People Operations Specialist

About Goodfire

Goodfire is a research company using interpretability to understand, learn from, and design AI systems. Our mission is to build the next generation of safe and powerful AI—not by scaling alone, but by understanding the intelligence we're building.

Scaling has proven powerful, but today's approach is fundamentally limited: we can't meaningfully understand, debug, or shape what models learn. Every engineering discipline has been gated by fundamental science and AI is at that inflection point now.

We're advancing the science of how AI systems actually work. Treating models as black boxes is an unnecessary handicap—we have access to the structures inside them, and understanding those structures lets us steer what models learn, make them safer and more useful, and extract the vast knowledge they contain. Our goal is to make AI that can be understood, debugged, and shaped like software.

Goodfire is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco with a team of the world’s top interpretability researchers and engineers from organizations like OpenAI and DeepMind. We're backed by over $200M from B Capital, Menlo Ventures, Lightspeed, Eric Schmidt, and others.

About the role

We’re seeking a People Operations Specialist to join our growing team! You’ll play a crucial role in creating an exceptional employee experience and ensuring our people operations run smoothly at a high standard. This is a fast-paced and high-volume role that requires strong judgment, attention to detail, and operational excellence. You’ll oversee everything from onboarding and offboarding to visa coordination, employee requests, benefits administration, and people programs. This requires you to balance multiple priorities and urgent requests at once. 

We’re looking for a people-first person through and through. You’re kind, proactive, highly organized, and excited to build and improve processes as we scale. You approach challenges with an ownership mentality and get energized when faced with a problem. No task is beneath you, and you’re ready to roll up your sleeves to tackle absolutely any operational detail, keeping in mind that every decision you make plays a role in the overall employee experience and success of the company. 

Key responsibilities

• Own the full employee lifecycle, including onboarding and offboarding, and everything in between- ensuring a smooth and high-quality employee experience at every stage
• Be the go-to resource for employee questions across HR, benefits, and people initiatives, responding with care, speed, and good judgment
• Administer benefits programs, including enrollments, changes, and employee inquiries, and serve as the primary liaison with benefits vendors
• Coordinate visa and immigration processes, partnering with an external vendor to support employees through every step
• Support payroll inputs and ensure data accuracy across systems
• Proactively identify inefficiencies and build scalable processes, documentation, and workflows that grow with the company
• Maintain compliance with federal, state, and local employment laws, keeping policies and employee records up to date
• Communicate people-related updates and announcements to the broader team in a way that’s clear, warm, and consistent 
• Partner with the Operations team on projects and step in wherever needed

What you’ll bring

Required experience

• 4+ years of experience in an HR generalist of People Operations role
• Deep familiarity with the full employee lifecycle and a track record of running people operations with minimal oversight
• Strong working knowledge of employment law, compliance requirements, and HR best practices
• Experience owning benefits renewals and open enrollment end-to-end
• Exceptional attention to detail and organizational skills
• High EQ and discretion when handling confidential information
• Comfortable working in ambiguity and juggling multiple priorities in a fast-moving environment
• Tech fluency across Google Workspace, Slack, and Notion

Preferred qualifications

• Experience working in a fast-paced, early-stage startup environment
• Experience coordinating visa processes
• Experience with Justworks or a similar PEO platform

Our values

Goodfire is looking for individuals who embody our values and share our deep commitment to making interpretability accessible. We are building a team first and foremost.

Put mission and team first

All we do is in service of our mission. We trust each other, deeply care about the success of the organization, and choose to put our team above ourselves.

Improve constantly

We are constantly looking to improve every piece of the business. We proactively critique ourselves and others in a kind and thoughtful way that translates to practical improvements in the organization. We are pragmatic and consistently implement the obvious fixes that work.

Take ownership and initiative

There are no bystanders here. We proactively identify problems and take full responsibility over getting a strong result. We are self-driven, own our mistakes, and feel deep responsibility over what we’re building.

Action today

We have a small amount of time to do something incredibly hard and meaningful. The pace and intensity of the organization is high. If we can take action today or tomorrow, we will choose to do it today.

Where we work

We are hiring for this position in our San Francisco office who’d be onsite 5 days a week.

What we offer

This role offers market competitive salary, equity, and competitive benefits.

The expected salary range for this position is $130,000 - $170,000 USD.

This role reports to our Executive Assistant.

Most importantly, you'll have the opportunity to join a vital mission at an important point in its trajectory — we are developing groundbreaking technology with a world-class team on the critical path to ensuring a safe and beneficial future for humanity. If you want to do your life’s work with us, even if you believe you do not meet every single requirement, apply now.