Full-Time

Senior Manager

Regional HR Operations, UK & Ireland

Updated on 8/6/2026

Icon

Icon

10,001+ employees

Global drug and device development services

No salary listed

Dublin, Ireland

Hybrid

Hybrid role based in Dublin.

Bachelor's

Category
People & HR (1)
Required Skills
Data Analysis

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Requirements
  • Significant HR Operations or HR Business Partnering experience within a large, complex, multinational organisation.
  • Demonstrated experience leading and developing teams, ideally including the management of HR Managers.
  • Strong experience supporting employee populations in Ireland, with a thorough understanding of Irish employment legislation and HR practices.
  • Experience partnering with senior business leaders and influencing decision-making.
  • Strong employee relations experience, including the management of complex cases and organisational change.
  • Proven ability to drive operational excellence and continuous improvement initiatives.
  • Experience using HR data, metrics, and analytics to inform decision-making and measure performance.
  • Excellent stakeholder management, communication, and relationship-building skills.
  • A bachelor's degree in Human Resources, Business, or a related discipline.
  • Legal right to work in the country where the role is based.
Responsibilities
  • Lead, coach, and develop a team of HR Managers and HR professionals across Ireland and the UK.
  • Drive the delivery of HR operations across the employee life cycle, including onboarding, employee relations, performance management, policy implementation, and workforce support.
  • Partner closely with business leaders to understand organisational priorities and develop effective people solutions.
  • Ensure compliance with employment legislation and company policies across Ireland and the UK.
  • Provide guidance and support on complex employee relations matters, investigations, and organisational change initiatives.
  • Monitor HR metrics, trends, and service performance, using data-driven insights to identify opportunities for improvement.
  • Lead continuous improvement initiatives to enhance operational efficiency, employee experience, and service quality.
  • Collaborate with HR Shared Services, Talent Acquisition, Reward, Payroll, and broader HR teams to ensure seamless service delivery.
  • Support business transformation, organisational design, and workforce planning initiatives as required.
  • Foster a culture of accountability, high performance, and customer-focused HR service delivery with the broader EMEA HR managers team.
Desired Qualifications
  • Experience supporting both UK and Ireland within a regional HR leadership capacity.
  • Knowledge of UK employment legislation and HR practices.
  • Experience working within multinational companies.
  • Experience leading HR transformation or process optimisation programmes.
  • CIPD qualification or equivalent HR certification.

Provides consulting, development, and commercialization services for drugs and medical devices through a global network to help clients accelerate development and bring products to market. A global team of experts in 53 countries offers end-to-end support across strategy, development, regulatory, manufacturing, and market access to reduce time to market, lower costs, and improve quality. The company differentiates itself with its large global presence, clear focus on speed and cost, and extensive experience across therapeutic areas. Its goal is to help clients accelerate the development of life-saving drugs and devices by delivering high-quality information, solutions, and performance.

Company Size

10,001+

Company Stage

IPO

Headquarters

Ireland

Founded

1990

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Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Claude can improve site intelligence, enrollment forecasting, and protocol optimisation.
  • Orbis can become a productized intelligence layer, lifting margins and client lock-in.
  • PRA integration and 40,200 employees strengthen scale, cross-sell, and global execution capacity.

What critics are saying

  • Claude dependence creates outage, pricing, and output-error exposure across trial workflows.
  • Competitors can mimic the AI narrative faster than ICON proves measurable cycle-time gains.
  • Global operations heighten compliance risk; one data breach would damage sponsor trust quickly.

What makes Icon unique

  • Founded in Dublin in 1990, ICON built a global CRO network across 55 countries.
  • ICON combines clinical development services with commercialisation support for pharma, biotech, medtech, and public health.
  • The Anthropic partnership extends Claude across Orbis, adding AI into trial operations.

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Benefits

Health Insurance

Paid Vacation

401(k) Retirement Plan

Mental Health Support

Life Insurance

Flexible Work Hours

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

31%

1 year growth

31%

2 year growth

31%
Yahoo Finance
Aug 5th, 2026
ICON shares jump 33% in three months on $29.7B backlog and improving biotech demand

ICON Public Limited Company shares rose 33.2% over three months amid strengthening recovery signs in clinical research demand. Request-for-proposal flow increased 22% sequentially in Q2 2026, with Phase III programmes representing about 50% of opportunity volume. Gross bookings reached $3.68 billion, up 24.1% year-over-year, whilst net business wins totalled $3.12 billion. The book-to-bill ratio stood at 1.51X. Backlog grew 3% sequentially to $23.4 billion, improving revenue visibility. However, second-quarter adjusted EBITDA declined 21.7% year-over-year to $327.2 million, whilst adjusted earnings fell to $2.56 per share from $3.52. Higher pass-through revenues supported sales but pressured margins. Analysts expect 2026 revenues to decline 1% and earnings to fall 15.3% year-over-year.

Business Wire
Jul 31st, 2026
ICON shareholders approve all resolutions at annual general meeting

ICON plc, a clinical research organisation, announced that shareholders approved all resolutions at its Annual General Meeting held on 31 July 2026. The resolutions, which were sent to shareholders on 26 June 2026, included the re-election of several board members and the election of new directors. The approved resolutions covered various corporate governance matters, including authorising the company to allot shares, disapply statutory pre-emption rights, and make overseas market purchases of shares. Shareholders also authorised the price range for reissuing treasury shares. Headquartered in Dublin, ICON employed approximately 40,200 people across 99 locations in 55 countries as of 30 June 2026. The company provides clinical development and commercialisation solutions to pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical device, and public health organisations worldwide.

Yahoo Finance
Jul 28th, 2026
ICON partners with Anthropic to deploy Claude AI across clinical trial lifecycle

ICON plc has announced a multi-year collaboration with Anthropic to integrate Claude's AI capabilities throughout the clinical trial lifecycle. The partnership will advance ICON's Orbis platform, developing four production capabilities: site intelligence and study planning, predictive intelligence for enrolment risks, protocol optimisation, and ecosystem integration. ICON will deploy Claude across its organisation through role-based implementations, including Claude Code for developers and Claude Science for scientific teams. The collaboration will strengthen Orbis's intelligence layer, connecting ICON's expertise and data across trials. Chief Executive Officer Barry Balfe stated the partnership aims to accelerate clinical trials by combining ICON's clinical development expertise with Anthropic's frontier AI capabilities, helping sponsors make better decisions and execute studies with greater precision.

Contract Pharma
Jul 28th, 2026
ICON to deploy Claude AI across clinical trial lifecycle.

ICON to deploy Claude AI across clinical trial lifecycle. Multi-year collaboration will apply Claude's AI capabilities to trial planning, enrollment risk detection, protocol optimization and client integration. July 28, 2026 Associate Editor Editor's Take: From drug formulation to workflow automation, artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming life sciences. ICON is the latest company to expand its adoption of AI. ICON plc has entered a multi-year collaboration with Anthropic to bring Claude's AI capabilities across the clinical trial lifecycle - further advancing ICON's digital innovation and AI strategy, and building on Orbis, ICON's secure, governed, agentic AI platform. Through this collaboration, ICON will work closely with Anthropic's Life Sciences research team to explore and apply technologies with the goal of accelerating innovation across clinical development. Barry Balfe, CEO of ICON plc, said, "We are determined to lead AI acceleration of clinical trials. Working with Anthropic gives us direct access to frontier AI capability and the people who build it. By combining ICON's clinical development expertise, global delivery model and proprietary trial intelligence with Anthropic's frontier AI capabilities, we believe we can help sponsors make better decisions earlier, execute studies with greater precision and ultimately accelerate the delivery of medicines to patients." How Claude will be deployed. With support from Anthropic, ICON will develop four production capabilities within Orbis: * Site intelligence and study planning: powering ICON's OneSearch and OnePlan tools with frontier model reasoning to sharpen site selection and study feasibility. * Orbis predictive intelligence: enabling real-time detection of enrollment risks, trends and operational signals across active studies. * Protocol optimization: applying AI to protocol design and scenario modelling to reduce amendments and accelerate study startup. * Ecosystem integration: integrating ICON's clinical expertise into client systems, allowing them to securely access ICON's insights directly within Claude. ICON will deploy Claude across the organization through a targeted, role-based rollout: Claude Code for developers, Claude for knowledge teams, and Claude Science for scientific and clinical teams for maximum value creation. "AI holds real potential to address long-standing challenges in clinical development and make a measurable difference for patients," said Pip White, Head of Ireland, UK and Northern Europe, Anthropic. "Far too often, the barrier to getting medicines to patients faster is operational, not scientific. Take study enrollment as an example - it's one of the biggest bottlenecks in clinical development and causes delays in up to 80% of trials. This is exactly the kind of operational challenge that ICON's trial-delivery expertise, paired with Claude, is well suited to address." Earlier this year, BMS announced plans to deploy Claude across its research, clinical development, manufacturing, commercial, and corporate functions.

Yahoo Finance
Jul 7th, 2026
ICON shares trade at 16.9X forward earnings as bookings rise but 2026 guidance signals revenue and profit decline

ICON plc faces a challenging recovery as investors weigh improved bookings against ongoing earnings pressure. The stock trades at 16.9X forward earnings, below its five-year median of 18.1X, but analyst price targets of $164 sit below the current $173.06 share price. Management reaffirmed 2026 revenue guidance of $7.85 billion to $8.15 billion, down from $8.25 billion in 2025. Adjusted earnings per share guidance of $10.00 to $11.00 also trails 2025's $12.53. First-quarter net business wins totalled $2.88 billion, with net book-to-bill at 1.42X and backlog rising 4% sequentially to $22.7 billion. However, execution risk remains elevated following an Audit Committee investigation that found improper revenue adjustments for clinical trial services from Q3 2023 through Q4 2024.