People Operations Manager

Our Mission and Opportunity Early education is one of the most important determinants of childhood outcomes, a critical support for working families, and a $175B market that remains underserved by modern technology. Brightwheel is the largest, fastest growing, and most loved platform in early ed, trusted by millions of educators and families every day. We are a three-time Cloud 100 company https://www.forbes.com/lists/cloud100/a, backed by top investors including Addition, Bessemer, Emerson Collective, Lowercase Capital, Notable Capital, and Mark Cuban. Our Team Our team is passionate, talented, and customer-focused. We embody our Leadership Principles https://mybrightwheel.com/about/ in our work and culture. We are a distributed team with remote employees across every US time zone, as well as select offices in the US and internationally. Who You Are You're a seasoned People Ops operator who thinks in systems and runs in programs. You've owned a broad HR scope before including benefits, onboarding, performance cycles, compliance, and leave administration. You know what it takes to uplevel these processes and run them cleanly at scale. As a systems thinker, you understand the architecture of the HR tech stack and can design the machine. You can envision how data flows between systems, where integrations break down, and what a well-designed stack actually enables. You're someone who looks at a manual process and immediately starts designing the automated version. You're energized by the challenge of building a smarter, AI-enabled People Ops function. You take end-to-end ownership seriously. You notice when the data doesn't add up or when the process needs improving, and you go looking for the root cause. You're comfortable navigating high-stakes, sensitive work across Finance, HRBPs, Legal, and IT. And when something is broken or unclear, you fix it - even if no one assigned it to you. What You'll Do - Own and run company-wide People Ops cycles end-to-end for 500+ FTEs, including open enrollment, performance reviews, and merit cycles. Ensure they run effectively and with clear stakeholder communication at every stage. - Manage the People Ops HR tech stack, including Rippling, Lattice, Carta, and Cocoon. Own account administration, permissioning, vendor relationships (including regular account team touchpoints and renewals) and ongoing evaluation for consolidation or replacement. Stay current on product roadmaps and leverage in-product AI features to create a better experience for employees and managers. - Serve as the operational PM for People initiatives that require structured coordination, both within the team and across functions (ex. policy changes, new program launches, tech migrations). - Own People Ops data and reporting. Leverage AI to surface trends across headcount, attrition, engagement, and benefits utilization. Move the team to proactive insights on a regular cadence. - Redesign the new hire experience from the ground up: audit what exists, identify what should be automated or AI-assisted, and rebuild the onboarding journey for a workforce that spans US and international, FTEs and contractors, in-office and remote. - Evolve the HR help desk experience. Evaluate the current solution, explore consolidation with adjacent tools, and implement AI automation for high-volume, low-complexity requests. - Own benefits program operations end-to-end, including full ownership of open enrollment (from broker coordination to Rippling build to company-wide communication and employee education). - Manage ongoing broker, carrier, and perks vendor relationships, including regular account team touchpoints. Surface utilization trends and data-driven recommendations to the Director of People Operations. - Identify and drive AI automation of manual or high-touch processes across People Ops: LOA communications, offer send process, payroll, benefits Q&A, employment verifications, offboarding comms, and more. Build the solution, document it