Director of People Operations, Vanna Health
Serious mental illness healthcare services
Be an early applicant
Serious mental illness healthcare services
21-100 employees
Be an early applicant
21-100 employees
Company mission
To help people living with serious mental illness thrive by strengthening the community ecosystem around them.
Role
Who you are
- The Scaler: You have successfully navigated the "chaos-to-order" transition in high-growth startups, building processes that enable speed rather than hindering it
- Data-Informed: You use data (turnover, eNPS, engagement) to tell stories and make decisions, not just to report numbers
- Healthcare Domain Authority: 8+ years in People Ops, with 3+ years in a high-growth Digital Health or Clinical Provider setting. You understand the unique tension between "Tech" and "Care" cultures
- Empathetic & Resilient: You understand the unique emotional weight of working in the mental health space and can build support systems to prevent burnout
- Multi-State Strategist: Deep fluency in the regulatory complexities of CA, NY, and other key markets, including tax registrations and local labor nuances
- Systems Thinker: You view People Operations as a product. You don't just solve problems; you build the systems that prevent them
- Tech-Forward: You don't track licensure in a spreadsheet; you know how to implement systems that automate compliance
- Gritty Leadership: You possess the executive presence to sit in the Boardroom and the tactical grit to handle sensitive employee relations or payroll audits in the same afternoon
What the job involves
- Vanna Health is pioneering a new standard of care for individuals living with serious mental illness (SMI) through the power of community and radical belonging. We are seeking a Director of People Operations to serve as the principal architect of our organizational culture and human capital infrastructure
- In this capacity, you will bridge the gap between visionary strategy and operational excellence. You will oversee the holistic employee lifecycle—from technical engineering talent to frontline care team members —ensuring that Vanna Health remains a resilient, high-performance, and mission-aligned organization as we scale
- 1. People Operations & Scalable Infrastructure
- HR Tech Stack Strategy: Act as the product owner for the HRIS (e.g., Rippling) and ATS (e.g., Greenhouse) ecosystems, optimizing integrations to eliminate operational friction and manual data entry
- Total Rewards & Wellness: Manage broker relationships and design a competitive total rewards philosophy that reflects our mission, prioritizing mental health and EAP offerings that set a market benchmark
- Operational Excellence: Engineer distinct, high-touch onboarding and offboarding workflows that account for the unique hardware/access needs of corporate staff versus the clinical safety requirements of field teams
- 2. Organizational Effectiveness & Cultural Leadership
- Care Team Resilience & Retention: Partner with Operational Leadership to proactively monitor burnout and "compassion fatigue." Design evidence-based interventions to sustain the health of our care delivery workforce
- Performance Optimization: Implement a performance management framework that balances coaching and clinical competency (quality of care) with behavioral values, fostering a culture of radical candor and continuous improvement
- Executive Coaching & Enablement: Serve as a coach to first-time and seasoned managers alike, equipping them to lead hybrid teams with high emotional intelligence and accountability
- 3. Executive Strategy & Specialized Talent Operations
- Long-Range Workforce Planning: Partner with the Executive Suite to model organizational structures for 24-month growth horizons, identifying critical talent gaps before they impact EBITDA or care quality
- Technology Talent Engine: Architect a bespoke recruitment operation for Engineering, Product, and Data Science. This includes establishing technical assessment standards, engineering a high-velocity "top-of-funnel," and positioning Vanna as a premier destination for mission-driven technologists
- Care Delivery Scale-Up: Build a localized "Talent Factory" for clinical and coaching roles. Develop streamlined, high-volume sourcing and vetting playbooks that allow for rapid market entry without sacrificing the integrity of the "Vanna persona."
- Change Management & Communications: Lead the organization through pivots and scaling milestones, acting as the primary communicator to ensure mission alignment remains intact during periods of high growth
- Executive and Board Relations: Curate and present sophisticated people metrics—including DEIB benchmarks, compensation parity, and retention cohorts—for the Executive team, Board and Investors
- 4. Clinical Governance & Regulatory Compliance
- Credentialing & Lifecycle Management: Architect a rigorous, automated framework for the primary source verification and lifecycle tracking of clinical licensures (LCSW, RN, MD, etc.) to ensure zero-gap compliance
- Healthcare Risk Mitigation: Design and enforce specialized screening protocols, including OIG/SAM exclusions and multi-jurisdictional background checks, tailored to high-acuity patient environments
- Jurisdictional Compliance: Serve as the internal expert on multi-state labor law, localizing policy and handbooks to meet the specific nuances of a distributed, cross-functional workforce
- Audit Readiness & Data Integrity: Maintain an "always-ready" compliance posture for state regulators and payers, ensuring HR data handling aligns with HIPAA and HITRUST-level security standards
Our take
There are 14 million Americans living with serious mental illness, the vast majority of whom never receive any kind of psychosocial rehabilitation. This is a silent human crisis, with sufferers having life expectancies decades shorter than the average and a greatly elevated risk of poverty, homelessness and incarceration.
Vanna Health exists to help support people suffering from serious mental illness by strengthening the community support structures around them. A for-profit company, it works by providing values to its partner insurers, agencies and hospitals, bundling clinical treatment plans and community offerings in a way that greatly reduces the cost of care while delivering outcomes that far outperform the rather dire status quo in US mental health care.
Vanna Health raised significant funding in late 2022, enabling it to officially launch its services in the United States. It will be investing heavily in building new health care partnerships, expanding its clinical teams and developing its tech stack. In the longer term it could well develop into a significant part of the mental health care landscape in the US medical system.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
Dec 2025
$6m
EARLY VC
Dec 2022
$29m
EARLY VC
Total funding: $35m
Company HQ
Yerba Buena, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Giovanni Colella, MD
(CEO)Before co-founding Vanna Health co-founded Brightline, OODA Health, Castlight Health and RealyHealth.
Brian Meewes
(President)Was previously COO & CFO at OODA Health. Before that was Head of Growth, Operations and Finance at Alto Pharmacy, and Head of Finance for Symphony Commerce.
Tom Insel, MD
(Executive Chairman)Is also Adjunct Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences. Is on several not-for-profit and for-profit boards, and is a Scientfic Advisor to numerous firms including Alto Neurosci and Cerebral.
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