Head of People and Operations

Role: Head of People and Operations

WFO, Bangalore | 4+ years | 18-24 LPA | AI-native Product Consulting and Services

The Product Highway is an AI-native product strategy and engineering firm that partners with businesses from the earliest spark of an idea all the way through to enterprise scale. We grew from zero to multi-million ARR within our first year, working with clients across India, APAC, Europe, and North America.

The conventional product/software industry is coming to an end. The line between product development and business development is disappearing. The best talent won't spend a career maintaining one product they'll operate as forward-deployed product managers and engineers, building businesses end to end in small, high-leverage teams, one after another. That's the vision we're building toward.

AI got very good at the how shipping code faster than ever. But almost nothing has changed in the what: deciding what to build, why, and in what order. That's where we live. We believe software is an approximation of the real world, and what matters isn't lines of code or sprint velocity it's whether the solution actually maps to how a business works, how customers think, and how value gets created.

From in-house AI project managers to near-universal adoption of tools like Cursor and Claude, we've rethought every conventional process from first principles. AI isn't a feature we offer it's how we think, build, and deliver. The result: legacy systems rebuilt in under 6 months, enterprise platforms built in under 3, mobile applications shipped in under 1.

We only take on problems we find genuinely interesting and worthy of being solved, and we refuse to ship anything we wouldn't stand behind. Every hire gets us closer to that standard.

Regardless of role, every person at TPH shares these traits:

• End-to-end owners. You own outcomes, not tasks. If something you're responsible for falls through a crack, that's on you not because someone assigned it, but because you wouldn't have it any other way.
• Clear, direct communicators. Bad news doesn't get better with age. Context doesn't transfer through vague Slack messages. You surface problems early and communicate with precision.
• Uncompromising on quality. You have a quality bar that's yours, not your manager's. You won't ship something you wouldn't stand behind, even under deadline pressure.
• AI-obsessed. You see AI as how work gets done, not a nice-to-have. If you're still doing something manually that AI could handle, you feel that as friction, not normalcy.
• Structured thinkers. When faced with an ambiguous problem, you break it down, reason through the trade-offs, and arrive at a position not wait for someone to tell you the answer.
• Experienced enough to use AI systematically. You have enough depth in your craft that AI makes you dangerous, not dependent. You direct it, evaluate its output, and know when it's wrong.

We're scaling fast. More clients, more projects, more people joining every quarter. We need someone who leads the entire people function at TPH not someone who executes two pillars well and lets the rest drift. This role spans five pillars: talent acquisition, resource management, people operations, people growth, and culture. You'll own all of them. As you grow into the role, you'll build out a junior team to help execute, but the accountability stays with you. Nothing gets deprioritised because it's not your favourite part of the job.

This is also not a back-office role. It's one of the most public-facing positions at TPH. You'll be the face of our employer brand on LinkedIn, at hiring events, in talent communities. You'll talk to clients about team composition. You'll coordinate with sales on upcoming staffing needs. Candidates should associate TPH with you, and that should excite you.

Most importantly, you need to own the narrative. The best engineers and PMs in India default to product companies. Your job is to change that to make the case that working at TPH means more variety, faster learning, exposure to real AI adoption at scale, and the chance to build multiple businesses instead of maintaining one. You need to sell our work with conviction, not just post job descriptions and wait. If you can't make the greatest talent in the market genuinely excited about moving to services, this isn't the right fit.

You lead all five pillars below. You can build a junior team to help execute, but you set the direction, own the outcomes, and ensure nothing falls through the cracks. If a pillar isn't working, that's yours to fix not someone else's to notice.

• Recruit experienced engineers, product managers, and designers at scale the pipeline needs to be consistently warm, not reactive
• Build a dedicated sourcing pipeline for AI-native talent ML engineers, prompt engineers, data scientists, MLOps specialists
• Own and drive TPH's employer brand on LinkedIn, Twitter, and talent communities this is a public-facing responsibility, not an afterthought
• Craft and consistently communicate the narrative of why the best talent should choose services over product companies variety of problems, faster learning curves, exposure to multiple domains, working at the frontier of AI adoption
• Sell TPH's work to candidates showcase client impact, the culture, the AI-native way of working, and what makes this fundamentally different from a typical services company
• Build presence in AI communities, meetups, and hiring events in Bangalore candidates should know TPH before they see your outreach
• Manage end-to-end hiring job posts, screening, interview coordination, offer letters, salary negotiations
• Track and improve hiring metrics time to hire, offer acceptance rate, source effectiveness and continuously improve speed as recruitment demands scale

• Maintain real-time visibility on team utilization who's deployed where, at what capacity, and for how long
• Track project roll-off dates and proactively plan transitions
• Coordinate with sales/BD on incoming pipeline to pre-plan staffing needs before deals close
• Reallocate resources across projects based on changing client budgets, priorities, and timelines
• Participate in client conversations around team composition, ramp-ups, ramp-downs, and resource swaps explain tradeoffs without it feeling like a downgrade
• Optimize bench time direct idle capacity toward internal projects, upskilling, or TPH's own IP and tools
• Forecast hiring needs quarterly based on sales pipeline and current utilization rates
• Flag margin risks from staffing decisions understand cost-to-company vs billing rates enough to make smart allocation calls

• Own onboarding end-to-end not just logistics but how we work at TPH, AI tooling stack orientation, client engagement norms
• Manage day-to-day admin laptops, team swag, outings, team events, workspace coordination
• Set up and maintain HR policies suited to an AI-native services company leave, remote work, expense reimbursement, referral bonuses
• Handle compliance basics NDAs, IP assignment, contractor vs full-time structuring, especially as international client work grows
• Own documentation of all people processes so they scale without dependency

• Run regular 1:1s with team members to surface challenges, aspirations, and early warning signs
• Collect structured feedback from peers, leads, and clients on each team member
• Design and implement a performance framework that works for consulting milestone-based goals, client feedback scores, peer reviews, delivery quality metrics
• Set up incentive and compensation policies tailored to an AI-native services model not copy-pasting product company playbooks
• Run compensation benchmarking for AI roles actively market rates are shifting fast
• Own retention strategy project rotation to keep work interesting, learning budgets, growth paths within TPH
• Track engagement signals and flag flight risks early, especially for people on critical client projects
• Build a career ladder that shows people they can grow here from consultant to lead to practice head, or from delivery to building TPH's own products

• Own an internal upskilling cadence weekly AI tool demos, knowledge-sharing sessions, certification sponsorships
• Foster a culture of curiosity and staying ahead of the AI curve across the team
• Run internal hackathons or innovation sprints, especially during bench periods
• Create rituals and rhythms that build team identity even when people are spread across different client projects
• Be the culture carrier the culture on how work gets done in the AI era

• 4+ years in a people/HR/talent role with prior experience in a tech services or consulting company you understand how services teams work, how they're staffed, and why they're different from product orgs
• Has scaled hiring fast not just filled a few roles a quarter, but run high-volume recruitment for engineering and product teams in a growing company
• Has hired engineers, PMs, or designers not just screened resumes, but owned the pipeline end-to-end including closing candidates who had competing offers from product companies
• Comfortable being a public face of the company on LinkedIn, at events, in candidate conversations this is not a back-office role
• Comfortable in client-facing conversations about team composition and resource planning
• Can lead across all five pillars simultaneously without letting any of them drift you context-switch across recruitment, ops, resource management, and people strategy in the same day without dropping balls
• Has built or meaningfully improved at least one people process from scratch onboarding, performance reviews, compensation frameworks, or similar
• Understands the economics of a services business utilization, bench cost, billing rates, and how staffing decisions affect margin