Senior People Partner

Who We Are At Osmo

Osmo is a digital olfaction company, on a mission to give computers a sense of smell to improve the health and wellbeing of human life. Why? Our sense of smell both enriches and saves lives, and has a deep and direct connection to our emotions and memory.

Olfactory Intelligence has applications across industries including fragrance, manufacturing, security, medicine, and more. We believe in the power of automation and thoughtfully applied AI/ML to solve problems beyond the reach of human intuition alone. Osmo is headquartered in Elizabeth, NJ, with an additional office in Somerville, MA.

Why this role

Osmo is building the future of scent. We are a multidisciplinary company spanning AI research, chemistry, perfumery, product, commercial, and manufacturing. We are scaling quickly across a complex mix of teams, operating models, and employee populations, from highly technical researchers to commercial leaders to hourly manufacturing employees.

We are hiring a People Partner to help build a high-trust, high-performing People function through Osmo’s next stage of growth. This role will be a senior operator and trusted partner to leaders across the business, working closely with our incoming CHRO to strengthen the systems, practices, and day-to-day people support that allow Osmo to scale well.

Role Summary

This is a broad People role for someone who is both strategic and hands-on. You will partner with managers and leaders on employee relations, performance, org design, recruiting intake, onboarding, compensation processes, policy interpretation, and People operations. You will help ensure that the basics are run with excellence while contributing to the design of scalable People programs.

The right person will be comfortable in ambiguity, strong in judgment, calm under pressure, and able to move between sensitive employee matters and operational execution without dropping details.

Core Responsibilities

• People partnership and employee relations
• Partner with managers and leaders across Osmo on employee matters, team dynamics, performance concerns, conflict resolution, and sensitive workplace situations. Provide practical, well-documented, and values-aligned guidance while escalating appropriately to the CHRO, Legal, or Finance when needed.
• Serve as a trusted day-to-day People partner for employees and managers, helping ensure issues are handled with fairness, consistency, confidentiality, and good judgment.
• Performance, feedback, and manager support

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• Support Osmo’s performance and growth processes, including manager enablement, feedback cycles, calibration, performance documentation, and follow-through. Help managers build strong habits around clear expectations, continuous feedback, and thoughtful development conversations.
• Contribute to the rollout and continuous improvement of Osmo’s performance framework, ensuring it remains clear, lightweight, and scalable as the company grows.
• Recruiting, requisitions, and headcount planning
• Partner with the CHRO, Finance, recruiting, and hiring managers to run disciplined intake for new roles, backfills, and headcount requests. Help clarify role scope, leveling, interview process, decision criteria, and compensation alignment before searches launch.
• Support a clean requisition process that ties hiring decisions to business priorities, budget, leveling, and org design.
• Compensation, leveling, and org design
• Partner with the CHRO and Finance on compensation, leveling, promotions, equity refreshes, and headcount planning. Help maintain consistency across job architecture and support managers in making thoughtful, calibrated talent decisions.
• Bring enough judgment to identify when a role, team structure, or compensation question needs deeper review rather than one-off resolution.
• People operations and lifecycle processes
• Ensure core People processes run reliably, including onboarding, offboarding, employee changes, policy administration, documentation, manager communications, and recurring People team workflows.
• Partner with internal stakeholders on systems, vendors, benefits, payroll-adjacent processes, compliance workflows, and documentation. The goal is simple: no dropped balls on core People operations.

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• Culture and change management
• Help Osmo scale its culture with clarity, kindness, and high standards. Support leaders through organizational change, new operating rhythms, manager enablement, and employee communications.
• Be a pragmatic culture carrier: someone who can protect trust while helping the company make hard decisions well.
  

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of progressive People / HR experience, including meaningful HRBP, People Partner, People Operations, or People leadership experience in a fast-moving environment.
• Experience operating in a company where the People function had to be both strategic and scrappy. Startup, scale-up, technical, manufacturing, biotech, AI, hardware, or similarly complex environments are especially relevant.
• Experience supporting both exempt and non-exempt populations.
• Strong judgment in sensitive employee matters. You know how to listen, document, identify risk, maintain confidentiality, and escalate appropriately.
• Comfort advising managers directly, including in moments involving performance concerns, interpersonal conflict, conduct issues, accommodations, leaves, terminations, and organizational change.
• Working command of sponsorship and immigration processes (e.g., H-1B, visa transfers, permanent residency). Osmo works with outside immigration counsel; this role is the internal point of judgment — advising managers and leaders on the right approach per situation and keeping cases moving.
• Strong working knowledge of HR compliance across the employee lifecycle — wage and hour law (FLSA), worker classification, leaves and accommodations, EEO, and multi-state employment considerations; spots risk early and knows when to bring in Legal.
• Direct experience supporting wage and hourly (non-exempt) populations — timekeeping, overtime, pay practices, and the manager support an hourly workforce requires. Essential given Osmo's manufacturing population.
• More than just a strategist. You can build a tracker, clean up a process, write the comms, run the meeting, follow up with the manager, and make sure the decision is documented.

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• Ability to earn trust with senior leaders while still being direct, objective, and employee-centered. You are able to coach managers through difficult conversations and help them raise the quality of their leadership.
• Fluency in leveling, calibration, performance cycles, promotions, offer alignment, and the connection between job scope, pay, and organizational design.
  
  

Preferred / Nice-to-have

• Past partnership with Finance on headcount, compensation, payroll-adjacent processes, or workforce planning.
• Experience building People programs from early-stage or messy foundations into repeatable, scalable processes.
  
  

Base Salary: $141k - $162k

If this role inspires you we’d encourage you to apply. We are committed to recruiting, developing, and retaining an incredible team optimized for a diversity of thought, background, and approaches.

For all Full-Time Employees, compensation is just one component of Osmo’s total rewards approach, which is designed to support the well-being, growth, and long-term success of our team members. Depending on the role, this may include base salary or contract-based pay, along with access to health, dental, and vision coverage; a 401(k) retirement savings plan with company match; flexible paid time off and company holidays; and equity or incentive compensation for eligible roles. Actual compensation will vary based on factors such as experience, skills, location, internal equity, and other relevant business considerations. Osmo regularly reviews pay ranges and compensation structures to ensure they remain competitive, equitable, and aligned with current market data.

All employment decisions and responsibilities are determined based on current ability and your ability to grow, without regard to race, color, gender identity, sex, sexual orientation, religion, age, marital status, physical, mental, or sensory disability, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

Recruitment & Staffing Agencies: Osmo does not accept unsolicited resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of unsolicited resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to Osmo or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by the Osmo Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of Osmo and Osmo will not owe any referral or other fees with respect thereto.

In compliance with federal law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work in the United States and to complete the required employment eligibility verification form upon hire