People Partner

About Black Forest Labs

We're the team behind Latent Diffusion, Stable Diffusion, and FLUX—foundational technologies that changed how the world creates images and video. We’re creating the generative models that power how people make images and video—tools used by millions of creators, developers, and businesses worldwide. Our FLUX models are among the most advanced in the world, and we're just getting started.

Headquartered in Freiburg, Germany with a growing presence in San Francisco, we're scaling fast while staying true to what makes us different: research excellence, open science, and building technology that expands human creativity.

Why This Role

This is a rare opportunity to be the first dedicated People Partner in the region. Two talent colleagues and a workplace manager are already on the ground, but no one yet owns the People agenda. That leaves real scope to build the processes, culture touchpoints, leadership capability, and operational foundation a scaling NA team needs.

You'll split your time roughly 60% People Partnering / 40% People Operations, with the balance shifting as the team grows. Reporting to the Head of People (Freiburg), you'll work closely with the broader People team in Europe, acting as the bridge that keeps our US team well-supported in timezone.

This role suits someone with strong HRBP experience who can hold a room with senior leaders, but isn't too precious to roll up their sleeves on the ops side when it matters. Deep tech experience is essential; you'll be supporting engineers, researchers, and commercial teams, and you need to understand how they think.

What You'll Work On

People Partnering

• Serve as the primary People Partner for NA-based leaders and employees, providing in-timezone support across performance, team effectiveness, and organisational design.
• Coach and develop managers across the NA org, building leadership capability as the team scales beyond its current ~40.
• Partner with senior leaders on workforce planning and headcount decisions, feeding into BFL's global people strategy.
• Lead employee relations matters in the US with sound judgement and a solid grasp of relevant employment law.
• Act as the regional voice in broader People team conversations, surfacing NA-specific insights, risks, and opportunities to the global team.

People Operations

• Own the smooth running of core People Ops processes for NA: employee lifecycle events, onboarding, offboarding, compliance, and HRIS hygiene.
• Ensure US employment practices are compliant across every state where BFL operates, partnering with Legal where needed.
• Collaborate with People Ops colleagues in Europe to maintain consistent global standards while adapting processes for the US context.
• Use data and tooling to keep NA People Ops running cleanly and at scale — spot inefficiencies and fix them.
• Be the person on the ground when something needs sorting fast and Europe is hours ahead.

What We're Looking For

• 6+ years of People/HR experience, with meaningful time in a Business Partnering or People Partner role.
• Must have worked in tech; deep tech (AI, infrastructure, developer tooling, fintech, or similar) strongly preferred.
• Experience working within or alongside a European-headquartered company — you understand the cultural nuances and time zone dynamics.
• Solid command of US employment law; you know when to act and when to escalate to counsel.
• Comfortable operating across both strategic partnering and hands-on People Ops — the hybrid nature of the role energises you.
• Strong coaching instincts and the credibility to influence VP-level stakeholders.
• A data-informed approach — you use people metrics to tell stories and drive decisions.

While not required, it’s an added plus if you also have:

• Experience as the first or only People Partner in a region, or in an early-stage/scaling environment.
• Experience building or improving people processes from scratch.

How We Work Together

We’re a distributed team with real offices that people actually use. Depending on your role, you’ll either join us in Freiburg or SF at least 2 days a week (or one full week every other week), or work remotely with a monthly in-person week to stay connected. We’ll cover reasonable travel costs to make this possible. We think in-person time matters, and we’ve structured things to make it accessible to all. We’ll discuss what this will look like for the role during our interview process.

Everything we do is grounded in four values:

• Obsessed. We are a frontier research lab. The science has to be right, the understanding deep, the product beautiful.
• Low Ego. The work speaks. The best idea wins, no matter who said it. Credit is shared. Nobody is above any task.
• Bold. We take the ambitious bet. We ship, we do not wait for conditions to be perfect.
• Kind. People over politics. We treat each other with genuine warmth. Agency without empathy creates chaos.

If this sounds like work you’d enjoy, we’d love to hear from you.

Base Annual Salary: $145,000- $165,000 + Equity