About This Role
Working as a founding People Partner, you will help Normal achieve its business goals by building effective teams and developing the talent needed as the company grows. You will partner with leaders and employees across research, engineering, hardware, and business teams to strengthen performance, development, and team collaboration. This role involves establishing the People Partner function at Normal, balancing opportunities to strengthen performance and development with the need to address people challenges and risks early.
Responsibilities
- Partner strategically with leaders, understanding business priorities, anticipating people needs, and advising on talent, organizational change, and team capabilities
- Coach and develop managers, helping them set clear expectations, give useful feedback, delegate effectively, and handle difficult conversations
- Deliver coaching, team training, and resources as leadership development work is built out
- Guide performance and development, supporting managers through performance reviews, assessing performance, and turning feedback into development plans
- Understand and improve team health using employee conversations, pulse survey results, exit themes, and people data to identify concerns and retention risks early
- Facilitate discussions on role clarity and working relationships, and work with leaders to agree on actions and assess their effectiveness
- Advise on employee relations and change, working with managers on performance concerns, employee issues, and conflict, handling sensitive situations fairly and with care
- Advise leaders on communicating and managing team changes, and involve People leadership and counsel in complex or high-risk matters
Requirements
- Experience advising leaders as a People Partner, HRBP, or in a comparable role within a tech or hardware company
- Experience across early-stage startups and larger companies
- Experience building practical People tools or delivering program components
- Experience coaching managers through feedback, performance, and development
- Sound judgment in employee relations, including fact-finding, confidentiality, and knowing when to involve People leadership or counsel
- Experience using employee feedback and people data to recommend a change and assess whether it helped
- Clear, candid communication, with examples of building trust and influencing leaders through difficult decisions or disagreement
- Experience supporting employees and managers across multiple countries; knowing when to draw on local expertise
- Experience using Rippling, Ashby, Lattice, Deel, Notion, Slack
- Experience supporting research or hardware teams, with an understanding of how their work shapes team structure, performance, and development
