Head of Talent Experience

Applied Computing builds Orbital, a physics-informed foundation model for energy operations. Orbital combines the precision of deep learning with the explainability of physics to help operators across refineries, upstream assets, and petrochemical plants make better decisions, faster. We deploy at some of the largest and most complex energy facilities on the planet. We came out of stealth less than a year ago and have already secured major enterprise deployments and partnerships. We are now scaling the team to meet demand, and we need someone to own how we find, onboard, develop, and retain the people who will build this company.

The Person

You think most HR is performative nonsense that protects the company instead of making it better. You want to build something simple and honest: systems that help good people do their best work and make it obvious when someone is not working out. You are comfortable with conflict, you do not hide behind process, and you think clarity is kinder than niceness. If your instinct is to add a policy every time something goes wrong, you will be miserable here. If you want to build a place where talented people can just get on with it, we should talk.

The Role

As Head of Talent Experience, you will own the end-to-end employee journey, from employer brand through onboarding, development, performance, and retention. This is a building role. We are at 32 people with a flat structure, no traditional managers, and high autonomy. Most of what you will need does not exist yet. You will design it, test it, and iterate it in a live environment with real constraints. You will work directly with the executive team and team leads to build systems that actually work at our pace and stage, not imported best practices from companies nothing like us.

Job Requirements

• What Success Looks Like

First 60-90 Days

• Full understanding of current people systems, gaps, and what is working
• Onboarding process redesigned and tested with at least one new hire
• Written role expectations (one page per role) drafted for all current functions
• Working relationships established with every team lead
• First assessment of retention risks across the team

6-12 Months

• Performance and development frameworks live and being used by team leads, not sitting in a document
• Career progression paths defined for engineering, research, and commercial teams
• Measurable improvement in onboarding time-to-productivity
• Retention of top performers strong. Regrettable attrition tracked and low
• People systems scaling without adding overhead as team grows toward 50+

Must-Have Qualifications

• 8+ years in People, Talent, or HR leadership roles
• Experience building people systems from scratch in a high-growth startup (AI or deep tech experience strongly preferred)
• Proven track record of scaling from 0 to 1 and 1 to 100+ headcount
• Comfortable working with technical founders and AI/ML teams
• Strong business acumen. You understand how the company makes money and why that matters for every people decision
• Analytical capability. You measure what matters and ignore what does not
• High ownership, low ego, strong bias for action

Nice to Haves

• Experience in energy, industrial, or infrastructure sectors
• Experience with international teams and multi-jurisdiction employment (UK, US, Middle East)
• Familiarity with flat organisational structures and non-traditional people frameworks

How We Work

• Flat structure. Team leads own their people. No traditional managers
• High autonomy, high expectations. We hire adults and treat them accordingly
• Clarity is kinder than niceness. Hard conversations happen early, not at review time
• We value doing the thing that matters, not the thing that optically scores brownie points
• Simple systems that work beat perfect frameworks that nobody uses

What This Role Is Not

• Not a traditional HR or compliance-first role
• Not a role where you import best practices from large corporates and assume they apply here
• Not a role for someone who measures success by policies written or programmes launched
• Not a passive advisory function. You will build, own, and be accountable for outcomes

Job Responsibilities

1. Onboarding and Employee Lifecycle
• Own onboarding end-to-end: new hires should be productive by week two and certain they made the right decision by week four
• Design onboarding that is tailored to function (engineering, research, commercial, operations) without creating unnecessary overhead
• Build and maintain the full employee lifecycle, from offer acceptance through to exit, identifying where it breaks and fixing it
• Create lightweight feedback mechanisms that surface real problems, not engagement theatre
2. Development and Performance
• Build performance frameworks that work in a flat, high-autonomy structure where team leads own their people
• Design career progression paths for engineering, research, and commercial teams that are honest about what growth looks like here
• Ensure development happens through the work itself, not through training programmes disconnected from production
• Contribute to incentive and compensation frameworks that reward performance and retention of top performers
• Equip team leads to have direct, timely conversations about performance rather than deferring to process
3. Culture and Retention
• Protect and scale the culture as we grow, without codifying it into something lifeless
• Identify retention risks early. By the time someone is interviewing elsewhere, you have already lost
• Run engagement mechanisms that produce actionable signal, not vanity metrics
• Ensure every exit is understood, logged, and patterns reviewed with leadership
4. Talent Operations and Systems
• Work with finance and operations to scale people systems that stay simple as headcount grows
• Maintain compliance without letting it become the point. Startup agility matters more than perfect process
• Build people analytics that support real decisions, not dashboards nobody reads
5. Employer Brand
• Partner with the Head of Talent Acquisition to build an employer brand that attracts builders, not spectators
• Craft a value proposition that is honest about what working here is actually like: high autonomy, high expectations, low bureaucracy
• Strengthen our visibility within the AI ecosystem as a place where exceptional people do their best work