Head of People

Hey! Shun here, I’m the CEO and co-founder of Anima. Our mission is to deliver precision medicine to everyone in the world in under 24 hours.
My entire life, I’ve been pulling on a thread that’s affected all of us in some way. Millions die every year because their medical problems aren’t treated quickly enough. Hundreds of millions suffer pain, worry and discomfort needlessly because of long waiting times. I trained as a doctor in the NHS and quit out of frustration at seeing countless cases of people dying because they got misdiagnosed or didn’t get the right care plan.
Seeing the problem space at all abstraction levels, including as a doctor and at the HM Treasury, convinced me that the only way to fix healthcare was to build a ‘Care Enablement’ platform that can automate and abstract away work at the clinic, and effectively 10x'ing the capacity of doctors. Doing so would also be the path to a superhuman personalised medicine agent that could go well beyond humans, crunching tens of thousands of low level features at genome and transcriptome level.
At Anima, you’ll help us extend the 3 existing product lines we have, that millions of patients use, and build out new ones at the very cutting edge of healthcare reinforcement learning and agentic AI. Your work will save countless lives.

Anima is hiring an exceptional People Ops leader to build the best company culture in the world. The entire company agrees that THE most important 2 power laws for Anima’s future success sit inside the People org.

We sat down in our Winter 2024 offsite to elucidate the ‘10 power laws’ that we consider the most important superlinear drivers of success. In short, the first is a talent power law relating to maximising TOFU, and the second is a people power law relating to culture. We’re under no illusions that solving for just these two things would be sufficient to make ‘victory inevitable’ - for the right Talent leader, you’d join a company that is completely hyperaligned on going to unbelievable lengths to attract and retain true outliers (to that point, we organised a week long hackhouse dedicated just to building out the next phase of our talent infrastructure).

Currently, we’re 25 people, so you’d be joining at the most critical time for culture building. This is not a traditional HR role. We want someone who is operationally ruthless, emotionally intelligent, and systems-minded — someone who deeply cares about both the craft of hiring and the crew we’re building at Anima.

• Extremely organised and reliable, with a bias toward action and ownership.

• Capable of managing lots of operational processes across multiple functions with speed and accuracy.

• Thrives in ambiguity and complexity — you love when there are too many things going on and somehow make it look effortless.

• Personable, warm, and can connect authentically with our crew

• Clear written and verbal communicator who can explain why decisions were made, what we learned, and what we’ll do differently next time.

• Owns weekly people operations metrics and can use data to gain a pulse on every member of the team.

• Draws insights from data to iterate quickly on what’s working (and what isn’t) - we love a strong experimental mindset!

• Comfortable receiving feedback directly, and sees it as a fast path to personal and team growth.

• Has managed end-to-end people operations processes before (ideally across both hiring and employee experience).

• Understands what a great employee experience looks like (both in-person and virtually)

• Capable of improving processes, and capturing repeatable workflows.

• Passion for automating the boring stuff — e.g. Zapier, Retool, Notion automations, ATS hygiene.

• Experience with employer brand building — from improving our careers page to amplifying team stories on LinkedIn or coordinating with agency partners.

• Strong writing skills — your docs, emails, and follow-ups are crisp, thoughtful, and leave no ambiguity.

• 5-10 years of experience in People Operations at a fast-moving startup.

• Direct experience managing end-to-end employee journeys — from onboarding, to scheduling feedback, to events, to data collection, and rapport building

• Proven ability to implement or improve scalable people operations or hiring systems (e.g. ATS hygiene, we use Ashby, feedback loops).

• Data-driven mindset with experience owning or contributing to weekly people operations metrics and using data to drive iteration.

• Has collaborated with external partners (e.g. agencies, embedded recruiters) and internal stakeholders across functions.

• Bonus: Exposure to process automation (e.g. Zapier, Hubspot, Retool, Notion workflows) or has shown curiosity to eliminate repetitive work.

• Bonus: Hands-on involvement in employer brand efforts — e.g. careers page updates, LinkedIn content, or sourcing campaigns.

• Mission-aligned: has chosen roles or projects based on purpose, not prestige.

• Own the entire people lifecycle UX and global company culture. Drive incredible UX through world-class people programs, including onboarding, development, performance management, and compensation frameworks.

• Scale our People and Culture engine, operationalising and player-coach your proprietary playbook to the whole People org, creating predictability and repeatability. Help build a generational, enduring company culture.

• Help Anima scale to around 50-60 in 2026, focussing on retaining our amazing team.

• Be a trusted culture champion and executive coach for non-technical skills, such as managing psychology, resilience, and mindfulness-based CBT.

• Individuals looking for a high-level strategic role without wanting to be in the weeds - our team is lean and this person will likely lead a small team (<5 people)

• People who want to come in to a structured environment and just run an existing playbook. This is a messy, high-context, evolving role.

• Folks who are scared of data, process, and automation.

• People who can’t handle emotional intensity. We work hard, we give feedback directly, and we care deeply.