Job Description

About Shippo

At Shippo, our vision is bold and clear: we are the shipping layer of the internet. Our mission is to make every merchant successful through excellent shipping, delivering world-class logistics technology and infrastructure. We’re building the backbone of global e-commerce — connecting merchants to carriers worldwide through a single API and intuitive dashboard.

As a remote-first and globally distributed team, we believe flexibility fuels trust, autonomy, and performance. Our diverse perspectives — across continents, cultures, and time zones — drive our innovation and enable us to build solutions used by businesses everywhere. We invest in modern, scalable technology so our teams can build, ship, and iterate with confidence.

Your impact starts here: every person at Shippo plays a direct role in shaping the infrastructure that powers global commerce and makes shipping simpler for businesses around the world.

How we will deliver success together:

The Lead People Business Partner is a senior individual contributor and strategic advisor who partners across all levels of the organization — from ICs to senior leaders. This role owns the full people strategy for its client groups, combining deep expertise in employee relations, performance, and engagement with the business acumen to influence decisions at the organizational level.

This role requires someone who is genuinely hands-on: comfortable doing the work, not just directing it. You will build and run programs, have real conversations with employees at every level, and bring both strategic thinking and practical execution to everything you touch. You will be the primary People partner for leaders and teams across GTM (Carrier Partnerships and Strategic Accounts), Customer Support, and Finance, while also driving company-wide programs in ER/performance management and employee engagement.

Shipping & handling responsibilities

Strategic Business Partnership

• Serve as the primary People partner for Carrier Partnerships, Strategic Accounts, Customer Support, and Finance — building trusted relationships at all levels, from ICs to senior leaders.
• Develop a deep understanding of each client group’s business model, goals, and talent challenges, and translate that into proactive people strategies.
• Advise leaders on org design, workforce planning, team effectiveness, and leadership development with a long-term, outcomes-oriented lens.
• Anticipate people risks before they surface, and bring forward data-informed recommendations that help leaders make better decisions about talent.
• Represent the People function credibly in business planning conversations, operating reviews, and leadership forums.

Employee Relations & Performance Management

• Own end-to-end employee relations matters across the U.S. and international locations, including performance improvement plans, complex investigations, terminations, and compliance.
• Build and continuously improve ER frameworks, documentation standards, and escalation paths that create consistency and reduce risk at scale.
• Provide expert, independent guidance to leaders navigating performance issues, corrective action, and sensitive employee situations — balancing legal risk, human impact, and business need.
• Design scalable performance management infrastructure — guidelines, toolkits, calibration processes — that can operate consistently without depending on individual heroics.
• Partner closely with People Operations and Legal to ensure fair, compliant outcomes, particularly across multi-jurisdiction situations.

Employee Engagement & Listening Strategy

• Go beyond survey data — build real relationships with employees at all levels, including ICs, to understand what’s actually happening on the ground and bring those insights to the right conversations.
• Translate engagement data into clear, actionable insights, surfacing patterns across client groups and helping leaders build credible, time-bound action plans.
• Design and maintain a listening ecosystem beyond formal surveys (e.g., pulse checks, stay interviews, onboarding/exit signals) that gives leaders ongoing visibility into team health.
• Partner with People Operations to build reporting and dashboards from available data — connecting engagement trends to retention, performance, and business outcomes.
• Champion transparency and follow-through on engagement commitments, helping Shippo build a culture of trust and accountability.

Performance & Leadership Development

• Lead the design and evolution of Shippo’s performance management philosophy, cycle structure, and manager enablement strategy — ensuring the system is fair, developmental, and operationally sound.
• Build manager capability through scalable leadership development initiatives, including AI-enabled tools that prepare managers for feedback, growth, and performance conversations.
• Partner with leaders to build meaningful development plans that retain and grow talent while aligning with business priorities.
• Support targeted leadership development programs for senior individual contributors and people managers within your client groups.

Role Clarity & Job Leveling

• Design and evolve job leveling frameworks that create shared clarity around role scope, expectations, and performance standards — particularly across GTM, CS, and Finance where career paths may be less defined.
• Partner with leaders to define and refine role and level guidelines for critical roles, ensuring consistent application across hiring, performance reviews, promotions, and compensation decisions.
• Identify structural gaps or title inconsistencies proactively and bring forward frameworks that scale with business growth.

Data & Strategic Insight

• Use data — including engagement, attrition, performance, and hiring signals — to identify trends, surface risks, and shape talent strategy for your client groups and the company at large.
• Partner with People Operations to turn raw reports into meaningful dashboards and visualizations that help leaders understand what’s happening with their people.
• Bring data-driven narratives to leadership, translating numbers into clear people implications and recommended actions.
• Leverage AI-powered tools and insights to operate with greater speed, precision, and foresight across all areas of your work.

Your shipping requirements

• 8+ years of experience in People Partner, HRBP, or related roles, with meaningful time operating as a strategic advisor to senior leaders.
• Genuinely hands-on: you’re as comfortable sitting with an IC to understand their experience as you are presenting recommendations to a VP.
• Experience supporting commercial, GTM, or customer-facing organizations — understanding the business dynamics of revenue-generating and client-oriented teams.
• Demonstrated ownership of employee relations programs at scale, including multi-jurisdiction complexity and compliance.
• Strong working knowledge of U.S. employment law; experience supporting international teams a plus.
• Proven ability to design scalable people programs, frameworks, and toolkits — and then actually run them.
• Strong systems thinker who connects individual decisions to org-level outcomes and anticipates second-order effects.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity, bringing structure and clarity without waiting for perfect information.
• Trusted advisor who can influence without authority, challenge leaders constructively, and maintain relationships across disagreement.
• Excellent coaching and facilitation skills, especially in high-stakes conversations across all levels of the org.
• Intellectually curious and eager to use data, AI tools, and emerging HR practices to work smarter.

What is in the Shippo Package?

• Healthcare coverage for medical, dental, and vision (90% covered by the company, incl. dependents). Pets coverage is also available!
• Take-as-much-as-you-need vacation policy & flexible working hours
• One week-long company wide winter slow down
• 3 Volunteer Days Off (VTOs)
• WFH stipend to set up your home office
• Charity donation match up to $100
• Dedicated programs, coaching, tools, and resources for your professional and career growth as well as an individual learning stipend for your personal and focused growth
• Fun team in person time through our Shippos Everywhere program which includes regular team and company off-sites throughout the year as well as local Shippos gatherings

Compensation

Our Compensation Shippolicy:

We believe compensation is a custom experience and are commited to fair and equitable compensation practices. The standard base pay range for this role is min is $155k to a max $210k annual salary (we tend to anchor our offers at the mid point $183k) Since we are focused on hiring Shippos Everywhere, we have 2 US pay ranges, a standard compensation range for the majority of the US and a standard +1 compensation range for those who live in areas where the cost of labor is higher, such as NYC and California.

The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: financial budgets, work experience, training, transferable skills, business needs, and market value. The base pay salary ranges are subject to change and may be modified in the future. Total compensation for this role will include, equity, medical, dental, vision and other benefits noted in our Shippos “package” section.

Sail through the process:

Here at Shippo, we celebrate inclusivity and are committed to creating equal access to opportunities for people from all backgrounds, perspectives and geographies. These values define who we are and everything we do. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply. If you need assistance, or a reasonable accommodation during the application and recruiting process, please contact us at accommodations@goshippo.com

Shippos in the wild:

Our people, much like the packages we help ship, are all over the world. This means, through our remote-first program, “Shippos Everywhere”, our roles can be based anywhere in the US with the exception of Delaware, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Hawaii, New Mexico and West Virginia and many roles can be based internationally.

For locations outside of the US and Ireland, the employment contracts are powered by Remote.com (all Shippo perks still apply - including equity!). What we want to emphasize is that you can be successful at Shippo regardless of location.