R-30 · GROUP
LEADS THE FUNCTION
Head of People and Talent
We have published a salary floor, a sponsorship map and a culture page with the failure modes written next to each tenet. Somebody has to make all of that survive contact.
FULL-TIME · REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
OPENINGS
1
One. When it is filled, this page comes down.
BASE SALARY
£260,000 to £440,000
The band, published. The offer is the same whether or not you push for more.
EQUITY
0.25% to 0.70% of CN Solar Labs
Founding equity in the parent, because this role serves all nine companies.
01
The problem this role exists for
The immediate job is recruiting at speed and at standard: sourcing into thirty-one open roles, running a process that decides within a week of the working session, and closing people who have other options. Then the sponsorship work, because we sponsor without qualification across seventeen jurisdictions and published that rather than hedging it.
The larger job is everything that breaks when a group of eight becomes a group of forty across nine companies: bands that stay honest, employment law across the sponsorship map, three degree apprentices whose university relationship somebody has to own, onboarding that has people shipping inside a fortnight, and the awkward duty of telling the founder when a stated value and an actual practice have come apart.
02
Your first week, and a normal Tuesday
Your first fortnight is triage. Thirty-one open roles, eight people, and no pipeline worth the name. What we would want from you by the end of it is an honest ranking of which roles are genuinely urgent and which we have talked ourselves into, plus the first version of a sourcing plan.
A normal Tuesday: candidate conversations, a closing call that matters, and a stretch of the unglamorous work that makes the rest possible, whether that is a visa case, a band that has drifted, or the QMUL relationship. One memo a week. You will disagree with the founder in at least one of them, and that is the job working rather than failing.
WHAT YOU WOULD BE WORKING IN
An applicant tracking system you will choose rather than inherit, whatever sourcing tooling earns its place, and a spreadsheet for the bands that you own outright. The output is people who join and stay, so tooling matters less here than judgement does.
We do not screen on tools. Nothing above is a requirement, and a stack list is a poor proxy for whether somebody can do the work. If you have gone deep in something else and would arrive with a view about why half of this is the wrong choice, that is an argument we would like to have.
03
What you would own
Not a ticket queue and not a slice of somebody else’s roadmap. Four things with your name against them in the decision log, from the first fortnight.
01
The hiring plan
Thirty-one roles, thirty-three openings, and the pace at which they close.
02
Sponsorship
The published map is a commitment. You make it operationally true.
03
Bands and policy
Reviewed upward without anyone asking, and written where people can read it.
04
The culture, in practice
The page says what we are. Your job is the gap between that and Tuesday.
04
What we are looking for
MINIMUM
What we would need to see
- ▸You have hired at pace into a small technical company, and can name people you closed against better-known offers
- ▸Real depth in at least one of: international employment law, immigration and sponsorship, compensation design
- ▸You are a generalist by choice. There is no function beneath you yet, and you will build it
- ▸You will tell the founder something he does not want to hear, in writing, early
PREFERRED
What would move you up the pile
- ▸Practice across the United Kingdom, the United States, the EU and at least one Asian jurisdiction
- ▸You have run a degree apprenticeship or a university partnership before
- ▸Experience taking a company from single digits to fifty without the culture inverting
- ▸You have designed compensation bands that were published internally and survived being read
Nothing in the preferred column is a filter, and neither list is applied before a human reads you. No degree is required for anything on this page, and we have hired people with doctorates and people with no degree at all into the same rooms. If you meet most of the minimum and not all of it, write anyway and say in the first paragraph which part you do not meet.
05
Pay, and everything around it
£260,000 to £440,000 base, plus 0.25% to 0.70% of CN Solar Labs, reviewed upward annually without you having to ask. The band is published here rather than discovered three conversations in, and the offer is the same whether or not you negotiate, because the band is the band.
Everything else is what the whole group gets and is not negotiated per offer: a holiday floor rather than a ceiling, health and dental and vision for your family, sixteen to twenty weeks of parental leave for every parent, a funded setup, monthly paid group meetups somewhere in the world, one required funded trip abroad each year, a protected day a week on the research ventures, and no non-competes.
The full list, the salary band chart and the visa sponsorship map are on the careers page. We sponsor without qualification across seventeen jurisdictions and publish exactly which.
06
Apply for this role
Four steps: a conversation with somebody who would actually work with you, one real problem drawn from work we are genuinely doing, a working session on your solution, and a decision within a week of that session. The problem is paid if it runs long, and you keep the work either way.