HR Generalist at January in New York City

Job description

• Application
• Collections today works like an emergency room. The doctors carry too many patients, everyone arrives at their worst moment, and nobody has their chart. We're making it primary care. January personalizes interactions and optimizes decisions across every stage of consumer credit. We started in the hardest, most broken stage, because if it works there it works anywhere.
• Most consumers want to pay what they owe. They want a way out, not a break. We've serviced over $20 billion in debt across more than 20 million consumers. We see more people with charged-off loans each year than all but the top five US banks. Those consumers rate us about 50% higher than the banks that lent them the money. Creditors net over 30% more because we collect more and charge less.
• Most AI strips the human out of the work. We use it to make someone's hardest financial moment more human. The more human we make it, the more people recover. Now we're moving upstream, catching people before they default and building across every stage of the consumer credit lifecycle. The consumer in collections today is the consumer who gets approved tomorrow.
• As our HR Generalist, you'll own the machinery behind every person's experience at January. January is adding headcount fast, and every hire widens the surface this role covers: onboarding, benefits, payroll, leave, and the compliance calendar underneath all of it. Your mission is to build the foundation needed to support exceptional talent and ensure that every team member at January has a seamless experience that allows them to focus on their work and thrive.

Responsibilities

• You'll own the employee lifecycle end to end, from the moment someone accepts an offer through the day, if it comes, that they leave. You'll support the semi-annual performance cycle and the annual comp cycle, manage leaves and accommodations, and be the continuous link between outside counsel and any employee working through a visa case — work that exists because we go after exceptional talent regardless of where it comes from.
• Designing and executing the key moments in the employee lifecycle, from onboarding to exit — running new hire onboarding start to finish with Recruiting and hiring managers, operating the performance and comp cycles, executing offboarding and advising managers through involuntary terminations, and being the first point of contact on pay, benefits, and policy questions.
• Owning HR's operational core — the compliance calendar, benefits administration and Open Enrollment, immigration and visa casework, and leave and accommodations administration.
• Building the HR infrastructure that scales with the company — owning the HR tech stack and vendor relationships, running payroll every two weeks, building the automation and self-serve systems that cut manual steps before they become a bottleneck, and turning HRIS and payroll data into the foundation for real people analytics.
• This is a role for someone who treats process as the product — who builds the documentation and systems that let this function scale with headcount instead of straining under it, and who gets the technical details exactly right, every time.

Requirements

• You read a messy, high-stakes situation and reach the right call without a clean rule to point to — and you update your read when new facts come in instead of defending your first conclusion
• You shift registers fluidly: the warm first contact on someone's first day, the steady presence in a hard conversation, the plain-English translator between an anxious employee and a lawyer's fine print — sometimes in the same afternoon
• You know the difference between a call that's yours to make and one that needs to go up or across — and you escalate deliberately, through the right channel, not reflexively
• You get the technical details exactly right on work with real legal exposure — a visa classification, a leave calculation, a filing deadline — because you know a small error here doesn't stay small
• You pick up work nobody owns and carry it to a real outcome, not a status update, and you leave behind a process your successor can run without you
• You build collaborative working relationships with Legal, IT, Finance, and outside counsel, and know exactly where HR's call ends and someone else's begins
• You surface a gap before anyone asks — a missed filing, a stalled case, a ticket sitting with the wrong owner
• You hear what someone actually needs underneath what they're asking for, and you fix the system, not just the one instance in front of you
• 3+ years of experience in HR/People Operations
• Nice-to-have: experience with Rippling, Sequoia

Skills

Required

• Ability to shift communication styles
• Ownership and follow-through
• Proactive gap identification
• Active listening and problem-solving

Preferred

• Experience with Rippling
• Experience with Sequoia