Head of People

Head of People

Hyderabad, India (on-site)  |  Scope: Singapore, India & UAE  |  Reports to: Founders / Management Team

About us

We are a premium personal-training company delivering one-on-one coaching to clients at home across Singapore and the UAE, powered by a central operations team in India. Our model is high-touch and quality-obsessed: every client is matched to the right trainer, every session is tracked, and client experience is reviewed daily.

About the role

As Head of People you will own the full HR function end to end across our Singapore, India and UAE operations. Based in Hyderabad, you will consolidate people responsibilities currently spread across management into a single, professional function — covering talent acquisition, induction, development and succession, performance, culture and engagement, reward, and policy, governance and compliance. Your mandate is to build a workplace where people want to stay: high employee engagement and low attrition are your headline metrics. We are looking for someone who can operate hands-on from day one while building the systems and policies that let us scale.

What you will own

Talent acquisition

•   Building and owning a talent pipeline, planning hiring needs 6–12 months ahead against the business plan

•   Ensuring Athleaders has the right people at the right price — owning role costing and offer benchmarking against the salary bands

•   Developing robust, repeatable acquisition processes: preparing and standardising job descriptions across roles and markets, structured selection, and background checks for new employees

•   Making offer calls for crucial hires

Induction & onboarding

•   Owning induction end to end so that every new joiner's first 3–6 months are happy, meaningful and successful

•   Establishing and maintaining onboarding policies and a consistent onboarding experience across all three markets

•   Tracking early-tenure success (probation outcomes, 90-day retention) and acting on what it shows

Development & succession

•   Building individual development plans for every employee, covering both functional and personal growth

•   Owning succession and substitute planning — and implementing it — so that no role is a single point of failure

•   Enhancing our ability to promote internally, and raising the share of roles filled from within

Culture, engagement & employee relations

•   Building the ecosystem and culture of a workplace where people want to stay and are happy with what they do

•   Owning employee engagement and attrition as measured outcomes — not just activities — and driving the actions that move them

•   Planning regular team engagement activities

•   Handling disciplinary matters fairly and in line with policy

•   Responding to employee enquiries (salary, deductions, career pathways)

Performance & accountability

•   Developing a performance-focused mindset across the company: everyone keeps their commitments and delivers on time and in full

•   Owning the performance management cycle — goal setting, reviews, feedback and follow-through

•   Building an environment where people actively contribute to the success of their colleagues and teams

HR systems, policy, governance & reward

•   Building a scalable HRMS that becomes a robust business-support tool, and maintaining HR master data within it

•   Owning the policy framework: the right policies, reviewed and updated regularly

•   Rigorous governance and compliance with all applicable laws, rules and regulations across the three jurisdictions

•   Ensuring HR processes are fair, open and transparent

•   Owning robust reward mechanisms — pay bands, incentives and recognition

•   Ensuring seamless communication, upward and downward

•   Establishing data-security guidelines and enforcing them across locations

Payroll & contracts

•   Reviewing the payroll file before each payment run

•   Reviewing and updating staff and trainer employment contracts across all three jurisdictions

•   Running the annual code-of-conduct acknowledgement and team sign-off

•   Reviewing company insurance policies

Team & leadership

•   Contributing to management-level decisions — policy, people budgets, organisation design — as part of the leadership team

•   Setting standards and building an HR function that runs without founder involvement

What we are looking for

•   Proven track record leading the HR / People function, ideally in a B2C / consumer-facing business

•   8+ years of progressive HR experience, including team leadership

•   Strong grounding in talent acquisition, employee relations, payroll/contracts and HR operations

•   Demonstrable experience building development, succession and performance-management frameworks — and evidence they moved engagement or attrition

•   Experience with workforce planning and reward / compensation structures

•   Has built or scaled an HRMS and used it as a business tool, not just a record store

•   Comfortable owning HR data, dashboards and reporting

•   Working knowledge of employment practices across multiple jurisdictions; exposure to Singapore, India and/or UAE labour context is a strong advantage

•   Excellent judgement, discretion and conflict-resolution skills

•   Based in India (Hyderabad) or firmly committed to relocating; this is not a remote role.

•   Looking for a long-term role where you can stay and build

What we offer

• A genuine leadership seat: you inherit ownership from the founders, not a layer beneath them
• Broad, three-market scope with direct impact on employee experience and company performance
• A quality-driven culture where people are the product