Chief People Officer

Chief People Officer Hybrid/London - up to 3 days per week onsite in our London office.

Salary - up to £150,000 + Equity

Why now? Cloudscaler is at an inflection point. We're 100 people, growing fast in a market that rewards quality and speed. In the next 12 months we'll double in size. Beyond that, we're building toward something considerably larger.

We have the commercial momentum, the leadership ambition, and the culture. What we need now is the people architecture to enable Cloudscaler to scale without losing what makes us distinctive: technical depth, delivery integrity, and a culture where people genuinely thrive.

The role You'll be the cultural backbone of Cloudscaler. The person who determines what it actually feels like to work here, how good people become great, and whether the organisation we're building at 100 people still makes sense at 300+.

This isn't a job for someone who wants to run an HR function. It's a job for someone who wants to build the culture that makes everything else work.

This is a remit with real scope and no artificial boundaries. It's a mandate to design the people architecture that lets Cloudscaler scale without losing what makes it worth scaling: the technical depth, the delivery integrity, and a culture where high performance and genuine fulfilment aren't in competition.

You'll shape how our people grow, how our leaders lead, and how capability is built ahead of demand. You'll sit at the leadership table not as the voice of HR, but as the person who makes the case, in commercial terms, for why investing in our people is the most leveraged thing this business can do.

What you'll be doing The culture: Cloudscaler's values, Mastery, Integrity, and Community, are the right ones. Your job is to make them real for everything we do: translating them from words on a page into lived behaviours that shape how people work, how decisions get made, and how performance is assessed. You'll own the culture strategy and act as its guardian as we scale.

The capability engine: a learning and development architecture that makes Cloudscaler's commitment to its people tangible: personalised development plans, AWS certification pathways, a fully operational Cloudscaler Academy, and an emerging AI practice capability. Bench time invested, not wasted. Development that converts directly into billable capability.

The career framework: clear, credible pathways across every role family, Technical Leadership, Cloud Engineering, Cloud Architecture, Consulting, Delivery Management, and Managed Services, that answer the question every good consultant asks: where can I go from here, and what does it take to get there?

The performance model: a lightweight, robust approach to line management and performance that gives managers the tools and confidence to manage well, and a rewards and recognition approach that makes high performance visible, celebrated, and connected to how people grow at Cloudscaler.

The employee experience: from offer acceptance to alumni status, an intentional, coherent experience of working here, with the listening mechanisms to keep us honest about whether we're delivering on our promise. The foundation of our employer brand, and a direct feed into the talent pipeline the COO is building.

The internal voice: a deliberate internal communications strategy that ensures every person in a hybrid, distributed, technically demanding workforce feels informed, included, and able to contribute, at 100 people and at 500.

What success looks like after 12 months This isn't a role where success is vague. By the end of your first year, we'd expect:

• Every person in the business knows what good looks like in their role, and what comes next.
• Onboarding redesigned and measurably faster: new joiners productive sooner, not just processed efficiently.
• Our rewards and recognition strategy identifies and highlights outstanding performance.
• Career pathways published across all role families, with progression criteria linked to the skills matrix.
• Line management consistent across the business: one charter, one standard, no postcode lottery.
• Performance conversations quarterly, values-anchored, and light enough that managers actually have them.
• A two-year L&D roadmap with a signed-off budget, clear metrics, and the Cloudscaler Academy operational.
• Internal comms rhythm established: people feel informed, and we can prove it.
• Culture still recognisable, and stronger for having been designed, not just defended.

Who we're looking for You've either built or fundamentally reshaped a people function in a consulting firm, technology scale up, or professional services business that was growing fast while you were there, or you've spent your career delivering large scale people and organisational transformations for clients and you're ready to own the outcome rather than hand over the report. Either way, you know what breaks when culture isn't designed: when managers are left to figure it out alone, when career paths are vague, when the people experience doesn't keep pace with the commercial ambition. And you know how to fix it.

You're not an HR generalist who imports frameworks and adapts them incrementally. You're the person who looks at how an organisation works, identifies what it needs to perform at the next level, and builds it: from the career pathways to the line management standard to the L&D architecture that makes both credible.

You are:

• A builder, not a custodian - You've designed things from scratch in growth environments. Frameworks that outlast your involvement, because they're practical enough to actually use.
• Commercially fluent - You make the case for people investment in revenue and margin terms. You understand utilisation, project economics, and the real cost of losing someone good, and you speak that language naturally with a CEO or CRO.
• Credible with sceptics - Technical leaders and experienced consultants have seen too many people initiatives come and go. You build trust with that audience quickly, because you understand what they do and why it matters.
• A practitioner, not an adviser - You write the framework and run the workshop. You don't hand things off at the point where it gets difficult to deliver.
• Instinctively honest about trade offs - Between standardisation and flexibility. Between investment and utilisation. Between what the business needs now and what it needs to build for. You don't pretend those tensions don't exist: you navigate them.
• Curious about the work - You don't need to be technical. But you need to genuinely understand why mastery matters to the people you're serving, and what it means to work in a cloud consultancy delivering complex programmes for demanding clients.
• You want to look back in three years and say: I built that. Not watched it happen, built it.

What you'll get

• Equity - A meaningful stake in a business that is growing hard and intends to keep doing so. This isn't a token option package, it's a genuine share of what we build together.
• Autonomy - A real mandate, not a managed one. You won't spend your time convincing committees. You'll spend it making decisions.
• Partnership - A leadership team to work alongside, challenge, and build something with.
• Pace - If you've found your current environment slow, bureaucratic, consensus driven, or risk averse, this will feel like a different game entirely.
• Impact - At 100 people, what you do is visible across the whole organisation. There's no hiding, but there's also no cap on what you can affect.

Why this role might not be for you This role is demanding. The pace is real, the accountability is real, and the standards are high. There will be days when the business is moving faster than the infrastructure supporting it, and closing that gap is the job.

This probably isn't for you if you're looking for a well scoped role with clear boundaries, a mature support function, and a gentle onboarding curve.

It probably is for you if you've been waiting for a challenge that's genuinely worthy of what you're capable of, with the equity, the autonomy, and the team to match.

If that's you, let's talk.

Benefits

• Discretionary bonus
• 25 days' annual leave
• 5 additional days per year towards training, certifications, or charity work
• Option to buy additional annual leave up to 5 days per year
• Public holidays opt out scheme, the option to work on public holidays creating the flexibility to enjoy your time off when it suits you
• Certifications and training expensed
• Life Assurance
• Long Term Disability cover
• Employee Assist Programme for employee advice and support (including legal and counselling helpline)
• Health, Mental Health, Wellbeing, Financial and Legal support
• 24/7 GP access
• Pension auto enrolment and contribution
• Employee referral scheme
• Client referral scheme
• Cycle to work scheme
• Travel expenses policy
• Dog friendly offices

Cloudscaler are proud to be an equal opportunity employer, committed to equal opportunities regardless of gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ancestry, age, marital status, disability, parental status, religion or medical history.

If you require reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process or within the workplace . click apply for full job details