People & Talent Lead

About the role

We are building a people function from the ground up. The foundations are in place; we have an HRiS, an ATS, a working employer brand, values, processes, and most importantly a talented and engaged team, and now we need someone to own and accelerate it. This is a standalone People Lead role reporting directly to the CEO. You will be the primary People Partner for the leadership team, owning the full employee lifecycle from talent acquisition through to performance, development, and engagement. This is a junior Head-of-level position: senior enough to set direction yet hands-on enough to do the work. Where we are, and where you come in Over the past several months we've worked with a consultant to establish the core infrastructure: basic tooling, a talent acquisition approach across our three hire types (AI/technical, clinical, and commercial), and early employer brand foundations. We've run our first values workshop and are mid-way through defining the behaviours and embedding plan that will make our culture explicit and durable. What we need now is someone to take ownership of this, running the ongoing talent pipeline, deepening our people partnering capability, and building the performance and development frameworks that will support us as we scale through Series A and beyond.

Responsibilities

• Talent & Acquisition
• Partner with hiring managers to deliver an end-to-end recruitment across that allows us to hire great talent
• Build and maintain our employer brand, leveraging our mission and clinical impact as a talent differentiator
• Use selective agency and search partnerships for niche or senior hires
• People Partnering
• Act as the primary people partner to the CEO, CTO and leadership team, advising on org design, team dynamics, and people decisions
• Support managers on performance conversations, capability development, and team health
• Be the go-to for employee relations, ensuring a fair and consistent approach
• Performance & Development
• Develop and embed a performance framework suited to a high-growth, mission-driven environment
• Build out manager capability, coaching and training our growing leadership layer
• Create career frameworks and progression pathways that help us retain great people
• Culture & Engagement
• Complete and embed our values work, turning the framework into lived behaviours
• Run engagement initiatives and track sentiment, acting on what you find
• Champion inclusion and psychological safety across a genuinely multi-disciplinary team (clinicians, engineers, AI scientists)
• People Operations
• Own our people policies and ensure they are current, compliant, and accessible
• Manage the people calendar: reviews, pay cycles, onboarding, offboarding
• Use data and reporting to inform decisions and demonstrate people ROI to the board

Requirements

• Solid generalist background across the full people and talent lifecycle; you understand how the pieces connect
• Genuine depth in HR business partnering and talent management; these are your spikes
• Experience in a high-growth environment (Series A-C stage, ideally sub-100 people), where you've had to build as well as run
• Comfortable operating as the sole senior people professional; you don't need a team around you to deliver
• Used to working directly with founders and C-suite, influencing and bringing structure to ambiguity
• Strong written and verbal communication; able to translate people strategy into things leaders and managers actually do
• Background in software, AI, healthtech, or another regulated sector
• Familiarity with the talent landscape for technical (AI/ML) and clinical hiring
• Experience with HRIS optimisation
• What does wild success look like?
• In 12-18 months, TORTUS has a talent pipeline we're proud of, a performance culture that engineers and clinicians genuinely value, and a set of values that are visible in how we hire, promote, and lead.
• Where does this role take you?
• As TORTUS scales through Series A, this role grows with a team beneath it. The intersection of AI, clinical care, and fast growth is one of the most interesting talent environments in tech right now, and your work here will shape the kind of company we become.
• Equal opportunities

Benefits

Additional Information

About TORTUS AI At TORTUS we work with clinicians and hospitals to provide clinically safe and reliable AI. We use speech-to-text and LLM models to infer information about a patient visit and provide verified documentation and actions, eliminating the documentation burden that costs clinicians hours every day. We've recorded over 2 million consultations. Clients include London Ambulance Service and a large proportion of UK GP surgeries.

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