About the role

Who we are: Sardine is the leading agentic risk platform for fighting financial crime. Our integrated solution unifies data across risk teams to help organizations stop fraud in real time, prevent AI-driven attacks, and automate fraud and AML operations. Sardine’s platform is strengthened by one of the fastest-growing fraud consortiums in the market, spanning more than 6 billion profiled devices, 800 million consumers, and 3 million businesses worldwide. Leading companies including FIS, GoDaddy, Intuit, Edward Jones, ZoomInfo, and Checkout.com rely on Sardine to secure and grow trust in their products. Our culture: - We have hubs in the Bay Area, NYC, Austin, Toronto, and São Paulo. However, we maintain a remote-first work culture. #WorkFromAnywhere - We hire talented, self-motivated individuals with extreme ownership and high growth orientation. - We value performance and not hours worked. We believe you shouldn't have to miss your family dinner, your kid's school play, friends get-together, or doctor's appointments for the sake of adhering to an arbitrary work schedule. About the role Sardine is looking for a Head of Talent & People to lead and grow our global team. This is a hands-on, player-coach role - you'll set direction and manage a full team of practitioners, while still staying close enough to the work to source a hard-to-fill candidate yourself, sit in on a tough employee relations conversation, or dig into a comp band directly. You'll own Talent, People Ops, and HR Business Partnering end-to-end, with a mandate to build pragmatic systems that scale with a fast-growing startup. What you'll be doing Team Leadership - Lead and manage a team of Recruiters, People Ops/HR professionals, including any team leads within those functions - Set goals, priorities, and capacity plans across Recruitment and People Ops/HR - Coach, develop, and performance-manage team; build a bench of future team leads as the org grows - Own headcount planning across the organization - Create the operating rhythm for the team (standups, pipeline reviews, OKRs, hiring sprints) without over-processizing a still-scrappy function - Model the player-coach standard you expect from the team - jump into the work alongside them Talent Acquisition (the largest part of the job. This role is Talent-heavy) - Build and continuously improve our hiring process: interview loops, scorecards, calibration, and candidate experience - Partner directly with the CEO and Exec team on leadership hires. Own full-cycle recruiting for key leadership roles, including sourcing, screening, and closing candidates yourself - Build scalable sourcing channels and employer branding so Sardine competes for top talent without over-relying on agencies - Track and report on hiring metrics (pipeline health, time-to-fill, offer acceptance) and adjust strategy accordingly People Operations - Oversee the People Ops Lead and team who own the employee lifecycle (onboarding, offboarding, HRIS administration, benefits administration, and compliance) - ensure the function runs smoothly and scales with rest of the company - Manage and scale our existing performance review, compensation banding, leveling, and promotion cycle infrastructure - this is already built and robust; your job is to run it well, refine it as we grow, and make sure it stays credible with employees and managers - Ensure compliance with employment law across jurisdictions where Sardine has employees, in partnership with your People Ops team - Provide oversight and escalation support on vendor relationships (benefits brokers, payroll providers) that the People Ops Lead manages day to day HR Business Partnering - Act as a trusted advisor to managers and the leadership team on org design, team structure, performance management, and employee relations - Partner with leaders as an internal leadership coach - Handle employee relations issues with sound judgment, discretio