About Dust

We're creating a new AI operating system that has the potential to change the way companies operate. Our mission at Dust is to transform how work gets done by letting any team and employee shape the exact agents they need to accelerate their jobs.

With 70%+ weekly active users, people stick with Dust as much as they do with Slack and Notion. We already are a core part of their jobs.

We're at an exciting stage of our journey—and growing fast. We're serving great customers like Cursor, Clay, Whatnot, and Persona, and aim to x6 our growth by the end of 2025.

Dust is a Sequoia-backed company with an experienced and determined team of optimists (coming from companies like Stripe or OpenAI) that like to focus on users, getting great things done by shipping fast, and doesn’t take itself too seriously while doing so.

We're looking for our first People person. Our ideal candidate is a seasoned People Operations leader who thrives in high-growth environments and enjoys designing HR systems and programs from the ground up.

You'll be shaping our people philosophy, building key systems and processes, and ensuring we maintain our high talent bar while creating world-class employee experiences across our SF, NYC and Paris offices as we scale from 40 to 90+ employees by the end of the year. Given our mission to transform how work gets done, we're looking for someone willing to design what People means in an AI world. You'll also craft the story we share with the outside world to attract exceptional talent.

What you’ll do

People Operations & Processes

• Design and build our People philosophy from scratch — defining what exceptional employee experience looks like in an AI-first company.

• Build lightweight but scalable processes across onboarding, performance, career development, and employee engagement.

• Implement and manage HR operations including payroll, benefits, HRIS, and compliance across multiple geographies.

• Partner with Finance and Operations to ensure seamless workflows around payroll, compensation, and workforce planning.

• Own policies, documentation, and frameworks that create clarity, fairness, and consistency as we scale.

Employee Experience & Culture

• Create a world-class onboarding program that sets new hires up for success from day one.

• Design and drive engagement initiatives that foster belonging, connection, and collaboration across Paris, SF, and NYC.

• Define and bring to life our Employee Value Proposition (EVP) so every team member experiences Dust’s values in their day-to-day.

• Shape rituals, events, and offsites that strengthen culture while keeping pace with rapid growth.

• Champion inclusion and high performance in an engineering-driven, global team.

People Strategy & Leadership Advisory

• Partner with founders and leadership on organizational design, team structures, and manager enablement.

• Develop and advise on compensation philosophy, benefits, and equity frameworks to support global growth.

• Leverage data and people analytics to provide insights on engagement, retention, and performance.

• Align People initiatives with business priorities to directly support Dust’s mission and growth trajectory.

• Act as a trusted advisor to leadership, helping scale teams while protecting culture and values.

What you won’t be doing

• Following traditional HR playbooks - we're inventing new approaches for the AI era

• Being siloed from the product and business strategy

• Managing administrative HR tasks exclusively (though some will be part of the role at the beginning).

Requirements

• Experience building: 6+ years in People roles, with proven experience designing and implementing foundational people processes (onboarding, performance, engagement, compensation, HR operations) in a company with a strong engineering culture.

• Scaling track record: Experience scaling teams from ~30–50+ employees.

  • Bonus: experience as a standalone or second People hire.

• Global mindset: Experience working with distributed teams across multiple geographies (ideally US and Europe) and navigating local HR/regulatory differences.

• Operational expertise: Hands-on experience running HR operations such as payroll, benefits, HRIS, compliance, and policy creation.

• Business acumen: Proven ability to connect People programs to business impact and partner effectively with Finance, Operations, and Leadership.

• Leadership partner: Comfortable working directly with founders and execs as a trusted advisor on org design, team performance, and manager enablement.

• Systems & process builder: Skilled at implementing HR/People tools and designing scalable, automated processes.

• Data-driven: Confident using people analytics to inform decisions, measure success, and influence leadership.

• Culture builder: Passionate about designing employee experiences that foster inclusion, belonging, and high performance in fast-paced, engineering-driven environments.

• Product mindset: You want to use our product, Dust, to innovate, push boundaries, and help us understand how to improve people’s experience.

• AI-driven approach: Excited to explore and adopt AI to optimize people operations, streamline workflows, and reimagine how People practices can be built for the future of work.

Nice to have

• Background in fast-growing SaaS companies

• Experience with equity management and international employment law

• Familiarity with tools like Notion, Slack, Rippling, Payfit, Ashby and modern HR tech stack

• Previous experience using AI tools to optimize people operations

Benefits & compensation :

Base salaries are just one component of the total compensation package and are determined by a number of factors such as years of experience, expertise, qualifications and more. In addition to base salary, we offer competitive equity packages that play a big part in recognizing you for the huge impact you will have on helping us achieve our mission. Please note, the salary range is a guideline that is subject to change without notice.

• Competitive compensation: €70K - €100K* base salary

• We offer substantial support for relocation, including a stipend up to €10k, finding an apartment in Paris, and supporting you with all residence and work permit-related procedures

• Significant equity package in a Sequoia-backed startup

• Health insurance for you and your dependents

• New MacBook Pro or Linux machine, monitor, keyboard, etc.

• Beautiful office in the heart of Paris

• Opportunity to travel to the US multiple times a year

• Regular team events and offsite

*We can go higher for outstanding profiles.

Location

We're prioritizing building our team with an in-person culture at our offices in Paris and San Francisco, valuing the magic that happens when talented people work closely together.

Why Dust

We're not building yet another enterprise SaaS tool. We’re creating an AI OS that will fundamentally change how companies operate. We believe existing AI models are powerful enough to have a tremendous impact on the world (and will keep getting better) – the key is building the infrastructure so that they have context and explore the best interfaces for humans to interact with them.

We have the unique opportunity to explore and shape the way humans interact with machines while working on a product we use ourselves every day.

If you're excited about crafting products that reinvent B2B software and want to join a team that combines the best of startup culture with the backing of top-tier investors, we'd love to talk.

👋 Even if you don't check every box in our requirements, we encourage you to apply. We value diverse perspectives and backgrounds, and we're more interested in your potential and passion than a perfect match to our checklist.

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Learn how we think and work.

• Our product constitution a story about our mission

• Agents at work - Latent Space, podcast with our cofounder, Stanislas Polu, 2024

• LLMs reasoning and agentic capabilities over time - dotAI, podcast with our cofounder, Stanislas Polu, 2024