People Programs Manager

At Algolia, we’re proud to be a pioneer and market leader in AI Search, empowering 18,000+ businesses to deliver blazing-fast, predictive search and browse experiences at internet scale. Every week, we power over 30 billion search requests — four times more than Microsoft Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex, and DuckDuckGo combined.

In 2021, we raised $150 million in Series D funding, quadrupling our valuation to $2.25 billion. This strong foundation enables us to keep investing in our market-leading platform and serving incredible customers like Under Armour, PetSmart, Stripe, Gymshark, and Walgreens.

We’re looking for someone who combines the mindset of a consultant, the discipline of a strong program leader and operator, and a genuine passion for creating a great employee experience.

This role is for someone who is naturally curious about how things work—and how they could work better. You’ll look across employee feedback, processes, systems, and stakeholder experiences to identify friction, diagnose root causes, and design thoughtful, scalable solutions.

Initially, you’ll focus on three critical areas of the employee lifecycle: onboarding, employee listening, and engagement. You’ll partner closely with teams across People, Talent Acquisition, IT, Workplace, and the business to understand needs, bring structure to complex or ambiguous problems, and improve the experiences employees and managers have at Algolia.

You won’t just execute existing processes. You’ll help shape the strategy behind them, lead programs from discovery through implementation, and continuously ask: What problem are we trying to solve? What are employees actually experiencing? Where is friction showing up? What does the data tell us? And how can we create something that works better for both employees and the business?

Success in this role means creating employee experiences that feel thoughtful, human, and connected while building the structure, processes, and operating discipline needed to make those experiences scalable and sustainable.

What You’ll Do

Employee Listening & Insights

• Own the execution and evolution of Algolia’s employee listening strategy, including engagement, pulse, onboarding, exit, and other lifecycle surveys.
• Turn employee feedback into meaningful insights by identifying trends, themes, risks, and opportunities.
• Combine quantitative data with qualitative feedback to understand what is happening and why.
• Develop clear narratives and recommendations that help leaders move from data to action.
• Partner with leaders and People Business Partners to understand what sits behind the data and determine where deeper discovery may be needed.
• Create reporting, communications, action-planning resources, and follow-up mechanisms that make employee feedback useful—not simply informational.
• Establish thoughtful processes that create a consistent and scalable approach to employee listening.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of listening programs and continuously improve how we collect, interpret, and act on feedback.

Onboarding Experience

• Own and continuously improve the end-to-end onboarding experience, from pre-boarding through the first 90 days.
• Assess the new hire journey across systems, communications, learning, manager touchpoints, community, and workplace experiences to identify friction and opportunities.
• Partner across Talent Acquisition, People Operations, IT, Workplace, Learning & Development, and business teams to create a coordinated experience.
• Use onboarding feedback, operational metrics, stakeholder input, and employee insights to prioritize improvements.
• Design experiences that help new hires build clarity, connection, confidence, and productivity more quickly.
• Establish clear ownership and workflows across the many teams involved in onboarding.
• Identify opportunities to simplify and automate onboarding processes without losing the human moments that matter.

Design Better Processes and Experiences

• Evaluate existing employee experience processes and identify opportunities to simplify, standardize, redesign, or automate them.
• Conduct discovery with employees, managers, and stakeholders to understand needs, pain points, and lived experiences before designing solutions.
• Build clear, scalable workflows with defined ownership, decision points, handoffs, documentation, and measures of success.
• Balance employee needs, business requirements, and operational realities when designing solutions.
• Translate strategy into practical execution plans while maintaining a strong focus on the employee experience.
• Build feedback loops into programs so employee and stakeholder input continuously informs how experiences evolve.
• Establish mechanisms for continuously evaluating whether programs and processes are delivering the intended experience.

What We’re Looking For

• A deeply employee-centered mindset, with strong empathy, active listening skills, and curiosity about how processes, systems, communications, and decisions are experienced by employees.
• A process-oriented mindset with experience designing, improving, and operationalizing workflows and programs.
• Strong program and project management skills, including the ability to define scope, prioritize work, manage timelines, dependencies, risks, and stakeholder accountability.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to take an ambiguous challenge, diagnose root causes, and create a structured path forward.
• Strong analytical judgment, including the ability to combine quantitative data with qualitative insights to identify patterns and make recommendations.
• Excellent written, verbal, and presentation skills, with the ability to turn complex information into clear insights, recommendations, and decisions.
• Strong stakeholder management and facilitation skills, including the ability to build trust, navigate competing perspectives, and influence without authority.
• A continuous improvement mindset and curiosity about how technology, AI, and automation can make work both more efficient and more human.
• Comfort operating in environments where the answer or process may not yet exist.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in creating people strategy and an eagerness to improve employee engagement, connection & belonging 
• Experience with employee listening, onboarding, engagement, or lifecycle programs.
• Experience leading initiatives that require coordination across multiple teams, perspectives and priorities 
• Experience with Lattice, Seismic, or similar tools 
• Experience supporting global or distributed organizations
• Familiarity with AI-enabled productivity tools and workflow automation

What Success Looks Like

Within your first year, you will:

• Become a trusted thought partner who helps the People team diagnose employee experience challenges and turn them into practical solutions.
• Deliver employee experience programs with strong project discipline, clear ownership, effective stakeholder alignment, and measurable outcomes.
• Build a more consistent, intentional, and measurable onboarding experience that improves new hire clarity, connection, readiness, and engagement.
• Establish an employee listening approach that moves beyond reporting results to generating insights and driving meaningful action.
• Improve or redesign key employee experience processes so that ownership, workflows, and expectations are clearer and easier to navigate.
• Simplify and automate manual processes where technology can improve the experience without sacrificing important human touchpoints.
• Build strong partnerships across People, Talent Acquisition, IT, Workplace, and the business.
• Create repeatable ways of using data, employee feedback, and stakeholder input to continuously improve the employee experience.
• Be known for bringing both rigor and empathy to the work—creating solutions that work operationally and feel better for employees.

FLEXIBLE WORKPLACE STRATEGY:

Algolia’s flexible workplace model is designed to empower all Algolians to fulfill our mission to power search and discovery with ease. We place an emphasis on an individual’s impact, contribution, and output, over their physical location. Algolia is a high-trust environment and many of our team members have the autonomy to choose where they want to work and when. 

We have a global presence with offices in Paris, NYC, London, Sydney and Bucharest, however we also offer many of our team members the option to work remotely either as fully remote or hybrid-remote employees. Positions listed as "Remote" are only available for remote work within the specified country. Positions listed within a specific city are only available in that location - depending on the role it may be available with either a hybrid-remote or in-office schedule.

WE’RE LOOKING FOR SOMEONE WHO CAN LIVE OUR VALUES:

• GRIT - Problem-solving and perseverance capability in an ever-changing and growing environment.
• TRUST - Willingness to trust our co-workers and to take ownership.
• CANDOR - Ability to receive and give constructive feedback.
• CARE - Genuine care about other team members, our clients and the decisions we make in the company.
• HUMILITY - Aptitude for learning from others, putting ego aside.

We’re looking for talented, passionate people to help build the world’s best search and discovery technology. We value autonomy, diversity, and collaboration. We’re committed to creating an inclusive workplace where everyone is respected and supported—regardless of race, age, ancestry, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, color, veteran status, disability, or socioeconomic background.

IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR CANDIDATES - Recruitment Fraud Notice

We’ve recently seen an increase in recruitment scams targeting job seekers. To help protect yourself, please keep the following in mind:

• Our open positions may appear on third-party job boards, but the best way to apply safely is directly through our careers page.
• All genuine communication from Algolia will come from an @algolia.com email address. If you receive an email from someone claiming to work at Algolia who does not have an @algolia.com email address, please do not respond or share any personal information.
• We’ll never ask for payments, purchases, or financial details during the hiring process.

READY TO APPLY?

If you share our values and our enthusiasm for building the world’s best search & discovery technology, we’d love to review your application!