People Operations Lead at Wise

As part of our People Operations team, your mission is to lead People Operations in India with ownership, pace, and sound judgment, delivering reliable, scalable support in a fast-moving and evolving environment. You will be hands-on when needed, lead and develop the team with a working smart mindset, and continuously improve and automate the Wiser experience using data and insight. While locally anchored, you are expected to operate with strong awareness of APAC and global People Operations, collaborating across geographies, navigating ambiguity, and making decisions that balance local needs with broader impact.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end People Operations in India: Act as an HR Generalist until the India team scales, with full ownership of the Wiser lifecycle from onboarding to offboarding, and direct handling of People queries from Wisers and Leaders.

• Lead, develop, and enable the India POps team: Lead, coach, and develop the team responsible for providing a comprehensive People service to our Wisers based in India.

• Drive continuous improvement and operational evolution: Lead local People Ops initiatives and contribute to both regional and global projects that improve efficiency, scalability, and the overall Wiser experience.

• Contribute to and shape shared services: Identify opportunities to centralise work into Wise’s shared services and actively support the transition, ensuring continuity and quality during change.

• Set goals, measures, and succession plans: Establish aspirational development goals and performance measurement KPIs/OKRs for the team to foster continual growth and succession planning.

• Ensure compliance across complexity: Ensure compliance with diverse labor, immigration, and financial regulations across multiple markets, updating processes to maintain adherence to compliance needs.

• Operate within an APAC and global ecosystem: Partner closely with APAC and global People teams to co-create solutions, influence policy and process changes, and ensure India does not operate in isolation.

• Use data to drive impact: Work with functional stakeholders to surface insights, trends, and risks, using data to inform decisions and strengthen stakeholder confidence.

• Embrace scope, ambiguity, and growth: Take on work beyond a fixed job description as needed, reflecting the pace, flexibility, and ownership expected in a scaling organisation.

Requirements

• Strong HR Ops Experience: Specialize in HR operations within a fast-paced environment. At least 5-7 years of experience in a Shared Service Center and at least 4 years experience leading a team.

• Experienced and Accountable Leader: A confident people leader who can develop, optimize and support teams while championing the working smart mindset and taking ownership of outcomes.

• Customer-Driven: Always thinking about how to automate and improve the Wiser experience while working smarter, not harder.

• Data-Driven: High proficiency in data tools and visualization, using data, facts, and insights to inform your approach.

• Project and Problem Manager: Solutions-focused, able to prioritize initiatives with the greatest business impact while managing multiple workstreams and trade-offs.

• Empathetic and Effective Communicator: Able to communicate clearly and thoughtfully with diverse stakeholders, adapting style and tone based on context and situation

• Initiative and Ownership Mindset: proactive and independent in identifying issues, raising them early and driving informed, evidence-based solutions forward.

• Resilient Change Agent: Motivated to challenge the status quo and support organizational change with steadiness, pragmatism and resilience.

• Collaborative and Globally Aware: Skilled at building strong relationships across team and geographies, influencing without hierarchy and engaging in healthy, constructive challenge.

Some extra skills that would be great:

• Financial services experience: you possess deeper insight to empower our team further with our commercial strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

This role may not be for you if:

• You’re most comfortable in highly structured environments with clear processes, fixed ways of working, and strong layers of support.

• You prefer having full clarity before making decisions, rather than operating in evolving or ambiguous situations.

• You’re looking for a role that is primarily strategic or hands-off, rather than one that sometimes requires rolling up your sleeves.

• You prefer working within a single local context and find cross-regional or global alignment challenging or slow.

• You’re seeking a role with a narrow scope rather than one that requires balancing local needs with broader People Operations impact.

Benefits

• Work in a fast growing and innovative People team within a thriving business.

• Contribute towards the bi-annual planning cycles, collate data on project deliverables, share ideas for improvements and lead new projects.

• Create continuous improvement within the team: partner with your global team to recommend new approaches and changes in policy and procedures, co-creating solutions with a global and mass customization outlook.

• Maximise advisory impact and partnership: collaborate with the People Partners (HRBPs) and senior stakeholders to share advisory data and trends to drive empowered and inclusive stakeholder relationships.