HR Business Partner

About Airbound

Our mission is to make a world where everyone has access to delivery. Where goods move as freely as information moves today.

This is possible. Today the cost of moving on a scooter is ₹2/km. That’s the cost of moving a 150kg mass from point A to B. We’re bringing that mass down to less than 5kgs, concurrently bringing the cost down to 10 paise/km. This is how we make deliveries a reality. This is how we create a world where we’re doing billions of deliveries per day.

The tech is not there. The current cost of drone delivery is ₹100/km. We need to completely redefine the way things are done here. We’re building the world’s most efficient aircraft from the ground-up, and scaling that up to beyond anything the aerospace sector has ever seen. This cannot be an iterative process. We have to tear down all conventions and build everything up from scratch.

To do this, we need nothing less than the best engineers. The ones who care about building something fundamentally different, who are deeply curious about understanding the fundamentals of everything they’re working on, who are dreamers that believe in the impossible.

About the Role

The HR Business Partner is the connective tissue between Airbound’s people and its mission. You will partner directly with engineering, manufacturing, operations, and business leaders to build an organization that can scale from 150 people to many times that, without losing the speed and ownership that make us work. This is a first hire role on the people-partnering side. You will design how we manage performance, grow managers, resolve people issues, and keep culture intact as we scale across locations, in an aerospace company that moves faster than the sector has ever attempted. Hiring is owned by our Talent Acquisition team. You own everything that happens once great people are here: how they land, how they grow, how they’re led, how they’re rewarded, and how they stay.

Key Responsibilities

• Partner with leaders across engineering, manufacturing, and operations as their trusted advisor on team structure, performance, and people decisions

• Own the post-hire experience in partnership with Talent Acquisition: pick up the handoff at signing and run onboarding, orientation, and 30-60-90 integration so new joiners ramp and stick

• Build and run performance management, from goal setting and review cycles to calibration and feedback, and improve it as we scale

• Coach managers through hard conversations, team gaps, and growth planning, raising the bar on how we lead

• Own employee relations end to end surface issues early, investigate fairly, and resolve them cleanly

• Design and roll out people policies, compensation frameworks, and compliance practices from scratch, tuned for a fast-moving hardware company

• Partner on organization design and workforce planning as teams form, split, and grow across locations

• Drive engagement, retention, and culture, keeping a real pulse on how the team is doing and acting on it before small problems become big ones

• Maintain accurate people data and documentation as the company grows

Qualifications

Must-Have

• 5+ years in HR business partnering, people operations, or a generalist HR role, ideally in fast-paced, engineering-first hardware or manufacturing environments

• Previous experience in the hardware, manufacturing, or aerospace talent landscape, and what it takes to grow and retain that talent

• Sharp judgment: you flag team risks and people issues in real time, before they become problems

• Strong track record coaching managers and leaders, and handling employee relations with fairness and discretion

• Experience owning onboarding and the post-hire ramp, and partnering cleanly with recruiting on the handoff

• Experience building people processes, policies, and performance systems from scratch, not just running ones that already exist

• Disciplined and process-driven, with a bias toward clean documentation and tight operational control

• Excellent communication, documentation, and cross-functional collaboration skills

• Comfortable with Google Suite, Notion, and other collaboration tools

Good to Have

• Previous experience as an early hire at a startup, building the HRBP function from nothing

Work location: Hoskote, Bangalore (Headquarters)
#LI-AR1

What We Offer

• Comprehensive health insurance to keep you and your loved ones covered

• Relocation assistance and a daily travel stipend to ease your commute

• Advanced salary credit to support you when you need it

“A driven, passionate team where you’ll have room to grow and thrive - this is more than just a job, it’s a rare opportunity to build something meaningful from the ground up”

Work Schedule:

• In-office role, working alternate Saturdays.

Ready to take off?

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