People Performance Lead

About this role

At Beam, you get to do work that matters for the world. We’re solving the world's toughest social problems with an incredible team, tech and AI. And we’re growing fast 🚀

It’s not easy. Nothing worth doing ever is.

Join a company at the forefront of social impact, driving first-of-its-kind positive change. You’ll be part of a high-performance culture where you'll make a huge impact, rapidly progress your career, and truly enjoy your work.

From top-tier coaching and personal development budgets to competitive salaries, we take care of everyone who works at Beam.

We’ve already seen incredible growth from our Beam Notes product, helping frontline workers save over 8 hours of admin per week. From social workers and NHS clinicians to mental health practitioners and safeguarding specialists, nearly 100,000 frontline workers across the UK, US and Australia are now using Beam Notes regularly to deliver faster, more human-centred support.

ABOUT THE ROLE

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.

YOU’LL BE

- 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.

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.

YOU'LL NEED

- 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 -…