VP of People

🚀 We’re on a mission to make real estate transactions smarter, faster, and friction-free. 🏢 Real estate is the world’s largest asset class, yet the legal processes and tools behind it remain slow, manual, and underinvested. Lawyers must review dense documents line by line and piece together information across silos, all while clients demand faster, more transparent due diligence. 🤖 That's where we come in. Orbital Copilot is the AI assistant built exclusively for commercial real estate law. Developed with former practicing real estate lawyers, it accelerates complex due diligence by up to 70% while delivering legal-grade precision. 💰 We’ve just raised a $60m Series B to accelerate our UK/US expansion. 🤝 We're trusted by leading firms like Goodwin and BCLP to remove the busywork so legal teams can focus on what they do best: applying sharp legal judgment, delivering standout client service, and getting deals over the line faster. 💡 Working at Orbital means joining a team that's reimagining how real estate transactions get done - moving fast, working collaboratively, and giving people the ownership to make a real impact from day one. THE ROLE This is the most senior People role in the company, reporting to our COO (based in the UK) and partnering closely with our CEO (based in New York). Your direct team is our UK-based Principal People Ops Lead, our UK-based People Enablement Partner, and a US-based People Enablement Partner we're currently hiring into the New York office, and you'll shape how it grows from here. Talent Acquisition sits as a separate function and is not part of this remit today. Your starting point is not a People roadmap handed to you in advance. It is the company strategy, operating model, growth plan, and AI-first ambition, and you'll use that context to set the people agenda. Orbital is at an inflection point: as the company scales, the challenge is not just adding headcount but building an organization that uses AI deliberately, redesigns work where automation creates leverage, and equips managers and teams to operate effectively in that environment. WHAT YOU'LL DO Lead from the business. Your first team is the leadership team. You'll be part of commercial, product, and strategic conversations, bringing a people leader's perspective to business challenges rather than representing the People function in isolation. From there, you'll form your own view on where the company's growth is constrained, where organizational design is helping or hindering, and what the business needs to execute its plan. You'll help the leadership team pressure-test growth plans against organizational readiness, spot where management quality, role clarity, or team structure are becoming bottlenecks, and ensure that how we hire, develop, reward, retain, and structure teams is aligned with where the business is heading. Set the People agenda from business context. You won't be given a predefined project list. Instead, you'll assess what you learn from the business and set the people and organizational priorities from there, drawing on the Principal People Ops Lead's strategic insight and operational knowledge from within the function to inform your thinking. That means making sure areas like organizational design, performance management, manager capability, onboarding, compensation strategy, benefits, career progression, and people systems are pointed at the right business problems and prioritized accordingly. A major part of the brief is translating current business realities into a sharper People mandate and challenging existing priorities when the business context demands it. Strengthen manager capability and performance. How Orbital defines, enables, and recognizes high performance is one of the biggest opportunities for this role to shape. You'll set the standard for what good management looks like here, shape how performance, progression, and recognition are assessed across the company, and hold your peers on the leaders...