People Lead

About Avra

Avra is a predictive AI platform for enterprise decision-making.

We are a frontier AI lab building our own relational foundation models from the ground up (no third-party wrappers) to power credit, growth, and fraud decisions for Latin America’s leading enterprises. Our customers include the continent’s largest banks and marketplaces.

Founded in 2024 by Viviane Meister and Bruno Alano (ex-OpenAI), and accelerated by NVIDIA, AWS, and Google.

We’re a small team. We’re all builders. Join us!

The role

This is our first dedicated People hire. Our customer base is growing, our research is advancing, and our product is delivering results. Now we want to invest in what makes that possible: our people. That means hiring, performance and culture.

You’ll work directly with our CEO & leadership team on company-level decisions. You will also build and run the function yourself. This means we need someone strategic who can also execute. A strategist who doesn’t execute won’t fit, and neither will an executor without a point of view.

You’ll use AI to automate routine work, so you can focus on raising the talent bar and helping our team grow as the company evolves.

This role is for you if you want to build a new kind of People function for the AI era, from first principles.

Responsibilities

Build a hiring machine without lowering the bar. Our hiring managers lead recruiting. You’ll give them the infrastructure and training to do it well. You will own our overarching hiring plan (once team leads have confirmed their needs within budget, and you have set the hiring gate principles with Finance). You will make reference checks count.

Make our employer brand distinctive. Our forward deployed team and world-class research team are hard profiles to find. You will build an employer brand that brings the best people to us.

Build our performance and growth system. Own the principles behind our performance philosophy. Run 360 cycles, feedback rituals and manager training. Design leveling, career paths, and how pay and equity link to performance.

Shape our culture and ways of working. Keep our values alive in how we hire, give feedback, decide and celebrate. Lead culture rituals across in-person and remote teams, and help define the “Avra Way” of working.

Run People Ops. Own benefits (including our healthcare provider), policies, contracts, and joiner and leaver admin with Legal and Security. Run vendor changes as projects with a clear plan.

Make onboarding a competitive advantage. Our team is highly technical, with an in-house AI model and a wide mix of skills. You are accountable for ensuring new joiners get full context and become productive fast.

Build AI-first People systems. Replace manual work with transparent, maintainable internal tools, automations and agents, such as a feedback assistant for managers.

What we’re looking for

A builder with strategic vision. You’ve designed People systems (performance, hiring, leveling), not only run them, and you can explain why you built them that way.

Comfortable doing the work yourself. You’re happy to own day-to-day People work while you build the function, without a team underneath you.

A drive to build something distinctive. Avra will never have a traditional HR department. And this isn’t a by-the-book People role. That should be exactly what draws you here.

Proactive. You’ve solved People problems before leadership asked you to.

Concise and opinionated. You get to the point. You’ll tell leadership what you’d change and why, with radical candour.

Energy coupled with emotional maturity. You stay steady through the pace of hyper-growth and challenging situations.

Tech-native. You’ve recently automated HR work with AI and can show it.

Experience and qualifications

Experience: 5+ years in People, Talent or People Ops, with clear progression. Ideally you've had exposure to a high-growth tech start-up. Or an organisation with a distinctive company culture.

Languages: fluent Brazilian Portuguese and English.

Local knowledge: solid knowledge of Brazilian employment practices (PJ, CLT, benefits).

Academic background: a bachelor’s degree, or any body of work that shows long-term commitment and continuous learning.

Tools: familiar with Slack, Google Suite, Notion, Claude, etc.