Head of People

About Azoma: Azoma a Series A company defining the Agentic Commerce Optimisation (ACO) category. We help the world's largest consumer brands, including Mars, Unilever, L'Oréal, Nestlé and Diageo, win visibility and revenue across AI shopping agents such as Amazon Rufus, Walmart Sparky, ChatGPT and Google Gemini.

The Role

We are hiring our first Head of People. Your mandate is to build the organisational infrastructure that lets Azoma scale without losing speed, quality or cultural intensity.

This is a builder's role. You will design our hiring engine, our performance systems and our people operations from close to scratch, then evolve into the strategic people leader who shapes the organisation for its next stage of growth. You will work directly with the founders and report to the CEO.

We run a high-cadence, high-accountability environment. We hire the best person for every seat, we measure output honestly, and we promote on results. If you believe that a rigorous, evidence-based bar is the fairest way to build a team, you will feel at home here.

What you will do

• Design and execute the hiring operating system. Build a scalable recruitment engine capable of supporting rapid headcount growth: role prioritisation, hiring scorecards, interview discipline, onboarding, candidate experience and recruitment reporting. Every candidate assessed against the same clear, demanding criteria, so the strongest person wins the role every time.
• Maintain hiring cadence in line with commercial growth. The business is moving fast. Recruitment cannot be the bottleneck.
• Partner with founders on organisational design. Work with the founders and senior team to define the 12-month organisation structure, reporting lines, spans of control and role accountabilities.
• Professionalise hiring quality without slowing the business down. Introduce consistent, objective hiring standards across sales, customer success, product, engineering, marketing and operations, while preserving the founder-led urgency that has driven our traction to date. We want a single high bar, applied uniformly, with decisions grounded in demonstrated capability.
• Build the core people infrastructure from scratch. Implement the policies, systems, processes, documentation and people rhythms required for a scaling UK, Canada and US-facing business. You will own people systems, compliance and international operations.
• Create a performance management framework fit for a scale-up. Establish clear goals, expectations, feedback loops, performance calibration, manager accountability and development processes. Progression at Azoma is earned through contribution and results, and your frameworks should make that transparent to everyone.
• Reduce founder dependency in people and team development. Protect founder bandwidth by taking ownership of organisational development, team coaching, culture, hiring discipline and the people-related operating cadence.
• Prepare the company for international expansion. Ensure Azoma has the right people infrastructure for its London and Toronto footprint and planned US entry.

Who You Are

• You have built people functions in a fast-scaling B2B SaaS or technology business, ideally through Series A to Series B.
• You are a systems thinker who ships. You would rather implement a working scorecard this week than perfect a framework next quarter.
• You hold a high bar and defend it. You are comfortable telling a hiring manager that a candidate does not meet the standard, and equally comfortable moving fast when one clearly does.
• You believe the best cultures are built on excellence, candour and accountability, and that the fairest process is one where every candidate and every employee is judged on the same objective criteria: skills, evidence and results.
• You are pragmatic on compliance. You know UK employment law well and can operate confidently across Canadian and US requirements.
• You thrive in intensity. Azoma moves quickly, and you find that energising rather than exhausting.

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