People Lead

About Avra

Avra is a frontier AI lab building relational foundation models from the ground up (no third-party wrappers).

We model how businesses and individuals are connected and interact over time. Put simply: we bring connections into the math.

Leading enterprises in LatAm use Avra's models to power key decisions in credit, growth, and fraud. Our customers include the largest banks and marketplaces in Latin America, such as Mercado Libre, Telefonica, Banco Inter and Getnet.

Avra was founded in 2024 by Viviane Meister and Bruno Alano (ex-OpenAI). Our investors include NXTP, Clocktower Ventures, as well as the Sequoia and a16z scouts. We are accelerated by NVIDIA, AWS, and Google.

We are a team of 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 will report to senior leadership, and co-own decisions on hiring plan, compensation framework and org design. You will build and run the People function. 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. Develop and run a structured hiring process owned by hiring managers: scorecards, interview loops, calibration and reference checks. You will improve the actual hiring plan, with final approval from the CEO.

• Make our employer brand distinctive. Work with the founders to tell the Avra story to the hardest-to-hire profiles, and make sure every candidate’s experience reflects it.

• Build a lightweight performance and growth system. Define clear expectations by role, set up simple, regular feedback rituals, and train managers to give good feedback. Design a simple leveling and career framework that fits our size. You design the model and recommend; the CEO decides on compensation and equity, with Finance and Legal.

• 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.