Founding People Operations Lead

Dwelly is a UK-based, AI-enabled lettings and property management platform, growing through a roll-up strategy acquiring estate agencies. The company leverages two arms: i) acquiring existing letting agencies, effectively buying its highly sticky, recurring revenue-type landlords portfolios, and ii) building a top-notch technology to automate tenant management, payments, and post-rental property maintenance. The company seamlessly integrates AI services to automate all business processes within brick-and-mortar real estate agencies, integrating them into a tech-enabled digital letting platform in two months to radically improve user experiences and increase efficiency.

We’re looking for a Founding People Operations Lead to take full ownership of Dwelly’s People function as we scale across the UK. This is a hands-on, high-impact role where you will build HR processes from scratch, drive compliance, and shape the employee experience across the organisation. You will partner closely with Leadership, Legal, and Recruitment to ensure operational excellence, support organisational change, and contribute to a positive, evolving company culture. This role offers the opportunity to own the HR vertical and grow the function, eventually building an operations team under you.

Key responsibilities

• HR Operations & Employee Lifecycle Ownership: Drive all core HR processes across the employee lifecycle, including onboarding, contract management, employee records, and offboarding. Ensure processes are structured, scalable, and consistently executed, delivering a seamless experience for every team member.
• HR Policies, Compliance & Employee Relations: Own and maintain HR and company policies while ensuring full compliance with UK employment law. Lead employee relations processes, including disciplinary actions, performance management, absence management, and organisational changes. Partner with leadership to provide consistent, fair, and legally sound HR guidance.
• Payroll, Administration & Data: Oversee payroll coordination and HR administration, ensuring accuracy of employee data, contract updates, and benefits. Serve as the central owner of HR systems, documentation, and data integrity, continuously optimising processes for efficiency and scalability.

Qualifications and Preferred Background

• Core Requirements: 5+ years of experience in HR; HR Operations, HR Generalist, or HRBP roles. Strong knowledge of UK employment law (essential). Experience owning HR operations end-to-end, including contracts, policies, and employee lifecycle. Strong communication skills and fluency in English. Startup mentality: resilience, adaptability, and ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment. Customer-centric mindset: focus on delivering value to our employees. Highly structured and organised, with strong attention to detail. Strong sense of ownership and accountability.
• Experience: Experience implementing or managing HR policies and compliance frameworks. Exposure to employee relations topics (e.g. disciplinary processes, performance management, absence management). Experience supporting organisational changes (e.g. scaling, restructuring, M&A is a plus). Proven ability to build or improve processes from scratch.
• Nice to Have: Familiarity with TUPE and UK redundancy procedures. Exposure to EU employment frameworks. Experience with HR data reporting or basic people analytics. Exposure to payroll coordination or benefits administration. Familiarity with HR systems, ATS platforms. Experience in a roll-up, acquisition-driven environment.

Compensation and benefits

Location: UK. Competitive salary with the potential for equity options based on performance, recognising exceptional contributions to our integration success.

What is it like being a Dwell-er? Feel free to check out Dwelly Core Principles. That’s about what we believe in, how we operate and make decisions. What we offer is not a fancy office or a static workplace. Instead, this is solving one of the world’s most complex problems in the largest consumer industry in the world (residential rentals), to improve the experience for over 30% of households (over 5M in the UK, and over 100M including EU and US) that live in rental homes. This is about disrupting the largest, most antiquated industry in the world, with one of the strongest operational and technical teams that exist in the UK and the EU. We work hard, and we shoot for extremely ambitious results. But we want people to be proud of what they’ve built and be able to look back and say one day “hell yeah, that was me that did it all.” Customer obsession rather than competitive focus.