Head of People

Your mission

Build a company where exceptional people do the best work of their careers, even as we scale. 

At Dunia, we are transforming materials innovation to build a utopian future of abundance. That only works if we build an exceptional people organization around it.

As our Head of People, you will work directly with the leadership team to design and scale the human engine behind Dunia. You will shape how we hire, grow, evaluate, and retain top talent in a highly technical, fast-scaling deep tech environment. 

Your mandate is simple but high-stakes: ensure that Dunia consistently attracts the best people in their field, helps them do the best work of their careers, and scales without losing speed, rigor, or culture  

Your tasks will include: 
Build a world-class hiring engine

• Design and run scalable technical and non-technical hiring processes 
• Partner closely with leadership to continuously refine the org and hiring priorities
• Define methods tomaintaina high hiring bar without slowing the company down

People as force multipliers 

• Build onboarding that accelerates productivity, ownership, and context
• Design and operate performance/feedback systems that reward impact

Be a true partner to talent 

• Coach leaders and high-potentials on team design, feedback,and people systems
• Provide thought-leadership around culture, incentives, and long-term talent strategy

Own the operational backbone of People 

• Oversee HR operations including contracts, payroll, benefits, visas, and compliance (with Finance and external partners)
• Ensure alignment with German labor law while keeping processes pragmatic and startup-friendly
• Anticipate people-related risks before they become bottlenecks

Protect and evolve company culture 

• Translate values into everyday behaviors, rituals, and decisions
• Design offsites and culture initiatives thatactually matter
• Build retention strategies focused on top performers and critical talent

Your profile

• You are a senior People leader who has already helped scale a company through real growth, complexity, and tradeoffs.

• Proven experience building and scaling People functions in fast-growing startups. You have had ownership over hiring, performance, and org design (typically 5+ years, but we care more about scope and impact than titles or timelines)

• Knowledge of German labor law, paired with the judgment to apply it pragmatically in a startup environment

• Credibility with senior leaders and highly technical talent. You can challenge, coach, and support founders, managers, and ICs with equal clarity

• Strong systems thinker who knows when to introduce structure and when to stay out of the way

• High bar for talent and performance, combined with fairness in how decisions are made

• Comfortable operating in ambiguity, setting direction where no playbook exists yet

• Clear communicator who can turn complex people topics into simple, actionable decisions

• Fluent in English and German

Most importantly, you believe that

• Great companies are built through people,

• The bar for high performance should constantly increase, and

• Bureaucracy is a failure of imagination, not a necessity of scale.