HR Associate - Founder's Office

What if HR wasn’t just about policies, but about building dignity into every paycheck?

At Without, we’re transforming “unrecyclable” plastic into high-quality materials and products, while helping waste-pickers transition into formal, empowered employment.

We’ve built the tech, earned the spotlight, and now we need a Human Relations Associate to help us grow ethically from the inside out.

This is a Founder’s Office role. You’ll work directly with our founder and across teams to shape the systems, culture, and care that keep our mission grounded in people, not just performance.

This role is part listener, part organiser, part cultural anchor. You’ll support people across backgrounds, from engineers to former waste-pickers, with clarity, care, and structure.

This isn’t a desk-bound HR job with cookie-cutter templates and annual retreats. It will be intense and NOT 9-to-5.

It’s hands-on, high-trust, and deeply human.

If that energises you, if you believe people are the real infrastructure of change, then we’d love to hear from you.

What We Are Looking For

• Experience & People Skills: 1-3 years in HR, people ops, or community-facing roles, preferably in fast-paced or impact-led environments. Experience with marginalised communities is a plus. We don’t care about your degree, we care about your depth.
• Cultural Fluency: Fluent in English, Marathi, and Hindi. You’ll be the bridge between our lab, operations floor, and Impact Initiative—so empathy across contexts is key.
• Trust & Structure: Reliable, organized, and discreet. You’re someone teammates trust and someone who builds systems that uphold dignity at every level.
• Empathetic Leadership: You lead by listening. You mediate without ego. You believe the best ideas—not the loudest voices—should shape how we grow.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: You’ll coordinate closely with our nonprofit to align benefits, track impact, and support health and upskilling interventions for former informal workers.
• Tools & Detail Orientation: Proficiency in Excel, PowerPoint, and basic HR tools (Zoho People, Zoho Recruit) is expected. You’re someone who can build systems, not just operate them.
• Start-Up Grit: Calm in chaos, quick on your feet, clear in crisis. You work with heart and hustle. This is not a 9-to-5, chill job, please do NOT apply if that’s what you’re looking for.
• Mission Alignment: You believe in building better systems, where HR is both compassionate and performance-driven.
• Location: On-site in Pune, India. Daily face-time matters when your team spans scientists, designers, and former waste-pickers.
• The X-Factor: You want to work where people, purpose, and possibility collide. Not just to do a job, but to help shift the system.

What You’ll Do

• Own Core HR Operations: Manage and streamline internal HR systems including Zoho People, leave tracking, contracts, and policy rollouts, bringing clarity and consistency to the way we work.
• Work Closely with the Founder: This is a Founder’s Office role. You’ll support leadership directly by ensuring people operations align with company values, scale efficiently, and centre dignity, especially as we grow.
• Support Ethical Hiring: Partner with team leads and the Founder to manage hiring pipelines, screen candidates, schedule interviews, and help onboard values-aligned talent.
• Strengthen People Practices: Contribute to systems that support team wellbeing and accountability, employee check-ins, basic performance tracking, feedback processes, and conflict resolution.
• Bridge Across Functions: Liaise with our Impact Initiative to align benefits, track social mobility outcomes, and support upskilling and healthcare access for workers moving out of informal labour.
• Support our Impact Initiative: Assist with scheduling, documentation, and process support for programs run by our non-profit arm, ensuring impact is tracked, measured, and felt.
• Contribute to Career Planning: Help structure role clarity and basic development pathways, especially for team members new to formal employment, as time and growth allow.

Your Compensation:

• An annual Cost-to-Company (CTC) between INR 4 - 6 lakhs. If compensation is your primary driver, this might not be the right fit. We offer ESOPs as part of the long-term vision, but meaningful upside will take time, and commitment to materialise.
• Every full-time employee at Without gets ESOPs. You’ll have a stake in the company you’re helping build because ownership isn’t just for the top, it’s for the team.
• A 3-month mutual incubation period. This gives both you and us the space to evaluate fit – ethically, culturally, and practically.
• Benefits include health insurance, Provident Fund contributions, and flexible hours (with unmonitored leave).
• We work with a flat, accountability-based structure. There’s no strict hierarchy, but clear ownership of outcomes, rooted in trust, collaboration, and mutual respect.
• Repeating: This is not an easy 9-to-5 job, please be ready to hustle, otherwise please don’t apply.