HR Business Partner (Senior)
People are the heart of every thriving organization — but at UnderDefense, we don’t need someone to manage the paperwork of that. We need someone to build the capability of the people who lead it.
This is not an administrative HR role. Onboarding, offboarding, and day-to-day HR operations are already owned by our HR Assistant/Ops function. What we’re missing is a senior HR partner who can step back, see the whole organizational picture, and use HR as a lever to make the company — and its managers — stronger.
What we can do for you:
- Direct access to the CEO and full visibility into business strategy — no filters, no bureaucracy
- Freedom to diagnose problems and propose solutions, not just execute a checklist
- A flat, founder-led structure where your input directly shapes how the company scales
- Ownership of a brand-new, strategic function — you’ll define what “great” looks like, not inherit someone else’s playbook
- Part of a bootstrapped Ukrainian cybersecurity success story, scaling fast
What you can do for us:
- Develop the management layer: Run regular (bi-weekly) 1:1 syncs with mid-level and senior managers — surface team issues, coach them on how to manage their people, share insights both ways. This is the core of the role, not a side task.
- Translate business goals into HR execution: When the CEO or business needs something delivered — a new initiative, a structural change, a hiring push — you understand how it maps onto the org and drive the HR side of making it happen.
- Own the internship-to-hire pipeline strategically: Operational logistics (scheduling, classroom setup) are handled by HR Ops. Your job is to develop the interns — soft skills, structure, mentorship, exposure to managers — so we can accurately validate who’s worth converting into a full-time hire, and set them up to grow fast once they’re in.
- Diagnose and act on retention risk: Spot attrition patterns before they become a trend, bring data and a proposed fix to the CEO — not just a report.
- Be a business partner, not a title: We’ve had “business partners” before who ended up doing admin. That’s not what this is. You need to operate at the level of someone who’s advised a CEO directly in an org of a similar size.
Requirements:
- 3+ years as an HR Business Partner or HR Manager, with direct, regular exposure to C-level/CEO decision-making — ideally in a company of comparable size (~20–100+ employees)
- A track record of coaching and developing managers — not just running processes for them
- Strong business acumen: you can hear a business problem and immediately think in HR levers, not policies
- Comfortable operating with ambiguity in a fast, non-structured, founder-led environment — you build the plane while flying it
- Upper-intermediate+ English — you’ll be expected to support onboarding conversations with US-based hires
- Confident pushing back and driving decisions, not waiting to be told what to do
Nice to have:
- Experience designing internship/graduate-to-hire talent pipelines
- Experience working with cross-cultural or distributed international teams
- Background in cybersecurity, tech, or another fast-scaling industry
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