Fractional HR Lead

Fractional HR Lead

Location: Remote, United States
Type: Contract
Hours: Approximately 10 hours per week on retainer

Overview

Own people operations for a distributed team spread across the US, Central Asia, Georgia, and Latin America. This is a build role, not a maintenance role: the job is to leave behind systems that keep working when you're not looking at them.

Responsibilities

• Own the monthly payroll cycle in Rippling. Run it, reconcile it against internal numbers, and clear profile or account issues before they block someone's payment.
• Keep contracts and classifications clean. Every person has a signed agreement in the system, categorized correctly as W2, US 1099, or global contractor, with the right tax forms collected.
• Run the recruiting pipeline in Workable and Hireflix. Post roles, move candidates through stages, screen for English and professionalism, and hand hiring managers a ranked shortlist with a recommendation attached.
• Build the onboarding system. Data intake, account creation, document generation, signature collection, and a clean handoff to the manager for the first-week plan.
• Run offboarding end to end. Notice, final pay, access revocation across Google Workspace, Slack, Figma, and everything else, equipment return, and knowledge transfer confirmed with the tech lead before the last day.
• Write and maintain the SOPs, offer templates, and policy docs in one place, then revise them on a schedule rather than after something breaks.
• Keep PTO balances accurate, so a request for two weeks off doesn't come back showing three days of balance.

Requirements

• You've run payroll end to end in Rippling, or a comparable multi-country platform, for a mix of W2 employees, US 1099 contractors, and global contractors. You know what a W-8BEN is and when you need one, and you catch it when a payment goes out twice.
• Recruiting pipelines are something you've operated, not observed. Workable, Greenhouse, Lever, whatever the stack. You can structure the stages, run one-way video screening, and give a hiring manager a shortlist instead of a folder of resumes.
• Documentation is a reflex. You write the SOP the first time you do the task, not the fifth, and you can point to a handbook or runbook that someone other than you actually used.
• Offboarding doesn't rattle you. Notice letters, final pay math, access revocation, and the knowledge transfer that has to happen before someone walks, handled without a lawyer holding your hand on every step.
• You work with AI the way we do. You've configured an assistant, an automation, or a workflow that removed recurring HR busywork. Using ChatGPT to reword an email doesn't count.
• Time zones and cultures don't slow you down. Most of the team sits in Tashkent, the rest is scattered across Georgia, Mexico, Argentina, and the US, and you'll need overlap with both PST and Tashkent hours.
• Follow-through without supervision. Nobody is going to check whether you sent the offer letter. You should be the one who notices a contractor hasn't been paid before he tells you.
• US-based, working as a contractor, with the bandwidth to hold about ten focused hours a week rather than ten distracted ones.

Benefits

• Fully remote, async-friendly. Work where and when you do your best work.
• Real autonomy. You choose the systems, the templates, and the workflow. No micromanagement of process.
• Direct line to the founder. No layers between you and the person who owns the outcome.
• Tooling budget for the AI tools, automations, and platforms you need to do the job well.
• A finance function already handled by a fractional team, so you're not absorbing bookkeeping alongside people ops.