(Senior) People Operations Manager (f/m/x)

About lemon.markets 🍋 We enable anyone to be an investor. Our mission is to grow investing opportunities for all European customers and businesses. By empowering FinTechs, banks, and wealth managers to offer investment products, we help create financial well-being for their customers. lemon.markets is a Brokerage-as-a-Service platform: simple digital access to capital markets through a single API. Our API-first infrastructure abstracts brokerage complexity with a well-documented API, a self-service customer operations portal, and a clear regulatory framework, so partners can launch customer-centric, compliant products in weeks, not months. As part of the dwpbank Group, we share a clear goal: making investing in capital markets more accessible. By combining dwpbank’s long-standing expertise and stability with lemon.markets’ technology-first mindset and speed, we are building a modern, modular securities services ecosystem. Together, we offer faster time-to-market, modular services, and a modern customer experience that helps financial service providers stay competitive and respond more flexibly in a changing market. Your Mission Your mission is to run and continuously improve lemon.markets’ People Operations backbone, so the employee lifecycle is smooth, reliable, and scalable as we grow. You ensure onboarding, changes, and offboarding are executed end-to-end with high quality, clear communication, and audit-ready documentation in a regulated environment. You are the owner of our People Operations workflows and data in Personio, with a strong GDPR-first mindset. You will spend most of your time keeping day-to-day People Operations running smoothly and improving the engine through automation, standardisation, and documentation. You will use dedicated capacity to drive project work based on business needs and operational insights you identify through daily operations. You sit in the People team and partner closely with Talent, Finance, and Office, reporting into the People Business Partner. In this role, you will: Employee lifecycle + payroll ownership: Own end-to-end People Operations across onboarding, changes, and offboarding, plus the monthly payroll process. Partner with the People Business Partner, Finance, and our external tax advisor to ensure smooth execution and accurate payroll inputs to reduce operational risk and keep teams moving fast. Employee support + request flow: Operate our People request flow via structured intake (e.g., ticketing/forms). Work with leaders and employees to prioritise and resolve cases with clear updates to strengthen employee support, improve the overall employee experience, and enable predictable delivery. Personio administration & optimisation: Build and continuously improve our Personio setup (workflows, templates, permissions, data quality checks, reporting). Collaborate with the People Business Partner and key stakeholders so decisions are based on reliable People data and manual work decreases. Compliance & data handling: Ensure compliance-by-design in People Operations. Align with Compliance, Legal, and Finance to keep documentation GDPR-first, access secure, and an audit trail in place to lower risk in a regulated environment. Documentation & standardisation: Standardise and document People Operations processes in Confluence. Work with cross-functional stakeholders to create clear process docs, checklists, and templates to reduce dependency on tribal knowledge and increase consistency. Automation & project improvements: Improve and automate recurring People Operations work through project-based initiatives. Partner with subject-matter experts and tool owners to remove bottlenecks and error-prone steps to increase reliability and create more capacity for growth. You’ll be successful in this role if you: You have a strong service mindset: you treat lemoneers and leaders as your customers and design People Operations processes that enable great work every day, not extra admin. You have 2–5 years of People Operations experience in a fast-moving startup or scale-up and have owned employee lifecycle processes hands-on, not just coordinated them. You are fluent in German (C1) and comfortable working in English, as you’ll collaborate in both languages day-to-day. You have hands-on experience working with German labour law in a People Operations context, and you know when to involve the right internal or external stakeholders. You are confident administering a People system (ideally Personio) and can improve workflows, templates, permissions, data quality, and reporting to reduce manual effort and errors using automation and AI. You work with close attention to detail and confidentiality, and you keep People data, access rights, and documentation clean and traceable in a regulated environment. You combine high ownership with sound judgement: you move work forward without waiting for perfect instructions, and you know when to pause, clarify, or escalate in sensitive cases. You communicate clearly in writing and verbally, and you naturally create clarity through Confluence-style documentation, checklists, and transparent status updates in a Slack-first setup. You are comfortable balancing steady operational volume with project work, switching between “run the day-to-day” and “improve the machine” while keeping quality high. How we take care of you: 🚀