People Performance Lead, Beam
£70-85k
+ Share options
2-3 days a week in office (Shoreditch, London)
Reinventing welfare services with Tech & AI
Open for applications
Reinventing welfare services with Tech & AI
101-200 employees
Open for applications
£70-85k
+ Share options
2-3 days a week in office (Shoreditch, London)
101-200 employees
Company mission
To give everyone access to human-centred welfare services.
Role
Who you are
- A natural relationship builder - quickly establishing trust and rapport with managers and senior leaders to become a credible, sought-after advisor
- A builder at heart - you enjoy creating solutions to complex people challenges and reach for tooling and frameworks before you reach for a calendar invite
- Commercially fluent - you understand the language of the business, speak in OKRs and metrics, and partner with department heads as a peer, not just a support function
- Results-driven - you thrive working towards clear KPIs, such as improving manager effectiveness scores and reducing the time to resolve performance cases
- Adaptive and resilient - you thrive in the fast-paced environment of a growing startup and remain optimistic when navigating complex human dynamics
- A strong multi-tasker - incredibly organised and comfortable switching between coaching a manager, resolving an ER case, and analysing team data
- Deep experience as an HR business partner - with a track record of building relationships with commercial leaders and fluency in the language of OKRs and business goals
- Demonstrable experience building or significantly improving performance frameworks - you know what good looks like and can build it from scratch
- Experience in a high-performance, high-growth environment - ideally a Series B+ start-up or SaaS organisation
- An instinct for scale - you build things that work without you in the room
- Confidence advising and challenging senior stakeholders - you form a view and say it clearly, even when it's uncomfortable
- Excellent communication skills across formats - whether you're writing a framework, presenting to leadership or guiding a manager through a difficult conversation
What the job involves
- This role sits at the heart of Beam's mission. We're looking for a strategic, commercially-minded, and builder-at-heart People Performance Partner to join our People team
- You'll be the driving force behind creating the performance infrastructure Beam needs as we scale - designing the frameworks, processes and manager capability that don't yet exist in mature form, and acting as a trusted people partner to department heads across the business
- Partnering directly with the Associate Director of People and senior leaders across Sales, Engineering, CS and beyond, you'll ensure our managers are equipped to lead high-performing, accountable teams - and that the systems supporting them are built to scale as we grow
- This is the perfect opportunity for someone who thrives on building from scratch, gets energised by commercial complexity, and sees AI as a natural part of how great People work gets done
- In this broad, hands-on role, you'll shape everything from performance frameworks and calibration processes to performance management and our manager resource infrastructure
- You'll spend the majority of your time building - frameworks, resources, guides and automations that live in our tech stack and work without you in the room
- Your default is to create something reusable. The goal is a self-serve layer of tools and resources that raises the quality of leadership across the whole organisation
- Building performance frameworks from scratch: You will design the standards, processes, and tools that underpin how the company assesses, develops, and holds people accountable, working with the AD of People and department heads to agree on what good looks like and ensure consistency across teams
- Owning the performance cycle: You will run Beam’s performance review process end-to-end: design, calibration, manager guidance, and outcomes. You will ensure reviews are evidence-based, ratings are consistent across teams, and the process produces decisions that hold up
- Coaching and developing managers: When managers bring you live situations - underperformance, unclear expectations, feedback quality - your default is to build something reusable, not solve them directly. You will identify patterns across teams and address them by creating resources that sit in our tech stack and work without you in the room. A recurring issue becomes a guide, a framework, or a co-pilot resource. Your measure of success is managers handling things independently, not managers who need to come back to you
- Partnering across all business areas: You will build working relationships with department heads across the business - Sales, Engineering, CS, and others - well enough to understand what is happening commercially in each area and what it means for their people. You will bring a clear point of view on org health, team structure, and people risk
- Handling complex and formal ER: You will support with employee relations cases where performance or capability is a factor - formal improvement plans, capability processes, and serious disciplinary matters
- Developing the L&D infrastructure: You will own the manager resource library and identify development needs through the performance cycle. Everything you build feeds into our AI knowledge hub, Ask-Beam - the goal is a self-serve layer that reduces dependency on the People team over time. Where a development need is systemic, you build the resource. Where it is individual, you direct the manager to use it
- Using AI to work at scale: This role is designed to have an outsized impact. You will use AI tools as a standard part of how you work: drafting frameworks, analysing feedback themes, producing manager guides, and turning repeatable tasks into automated ones
Salary benchmarks
Our take
Trusted by over 100 government partners, Beam is a social enterprise that brings AI to welfare services. Enabled by tech and AI, their caseworkers have supported thousands of underserved people into homes and jobs, whilst their software has slashed admin for thousands of frontline workers across the UK.
Beam is funded by established names in the UK tech scene, the world's top impact funds and the Mayor of London. Founder and CEO, Alex Stephany, brings a track record from his previous startup backed by Index Ventures and was even named Purpose Entrepreneur of the Year 2024. The rest of Beam's senior team has their own wealth of experience from a variety of leading startups, tech, and social impact businesses like Arm, Multiverse, and GoCardless.
Beam has also won multiple awards, including a Queen's Award - one of the UK's most prestigious business awards - and has twice been voted as one of the top 100 places to work in the UK. Their work has been covered widely in the media, with features from the BBC, The Times, FT, Forbes and The Independent.
AI has the potential to be a game changer for social workers and in a recent pilot, Beam's AI tool, Magic Notes, reduced the time spend on administrative tasks by over 60% and cut assessment write-ups from four hours to just 90 minutes. As councils explore next steps, Beam's technology is already redefining how frontline workers deliver care, so they can spend more time on what matters most.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Meet the team
5 people
Rachel Astall, CCO
Our mission
Our 5-person C-Suite brings together leaders from tech, care work and AI - bringing a wealth of diverse experience.Insights
61% female employees
61% employee growth in 12 months
Glassdoor (3.9)
Company
Company benefits
- Share options: Be a Beam owner with EMI-qualifying share options
- Access to therapy, coaching, classes & content - powered by Oliva
- 1:1 workplace coaching with Oliva
- Your own financial well-being coach, through Bippit
- Generous Holiday - 25 days with 3 additional days over the Christmas period + bank holidays
- Work remotely up to 6 weeks a year
- Eligible for a 6-week sabbatical after 3 years in service
- Nursery scheme through Gogeta
- Healthcare cover through Benenden Health
- Enhanced parental leave: Primary Caregiver leave 18 weeks and Secondary Caregiver leave 4 weeks
- £200 WellBeam budget for activities enhancing wellbeing and professional development
- Annual membership to Shoreditch Exchange gym (London office only)
- Pension scheme where we contribute 4% of your salary and you contribute 5%.
- Free subscription to the Calm meditation app
- Discounted bike and accessories with Cyclescheme, and tech products with Techscheme
Company values
- Mission first: We drive the mission for those we serve with heart, grit and zero ego
- Aim high and deliver: We deliver outsized impact through setting and executing against ambitious targets
- Raise the pace: We move with urgency and accelerate others, without compromising excellence
- Get better together: Everything is a work in progress. We constantly work on improving ourselves and Beam
Company HQ
London, UK
Articles
Leadership
Alex Stephany
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously CEO of JustPark, a leading online marketplace for parking with over 4M customers backed by Index Ventures. Expert on the sharing economy and author of The Business of Sharing (Macmillan).
Seb Barker
(Co-Founder & COO)Helped pioneer personalised healthcare for the NHS. Worked on the world's first social impact bond in homelessness.
People progressing
Ryan joined in 2020 as an Operations Executive. Since then, they have held a number of roles and are now the Head of Operations.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Beam
- We work hard to build teams that are diverse in every way.
- We’re committed to creating inclusive hiring processes which allow people with diverse backgrounds to showcase their talents
- We particular encourage applications from those who are underrepresented in startups: those from black and underrepresented ethnic groups and people with lived experience of homelessness/social disadvantage
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