People Generalist (m/f/d)

Role

Hive Robotics is building Europe's first full-stack orchestration platform for unmanned systems: connecting, controlling, and commanding multi-vendor drone and robot swarms. Our RF communication systems are Made in Germany, deployed on active frontlines, and targeting a highly valued tactical communication market with zero sovereign alternatives today.

As our first dedicated People Generalist, you own the people side of the company, from the first conversation with a candidate to an employee's last day. Recruiting and onboarding are where we need you most right now, so that is where your focus starts. Around that, you run HR administration and payroll preparation and help us build the structures, such as grades and career tracks, that let a growing team scale well. You report into Finance & Operations.

The foundations are in place: Personio is live, onboarding and offboarding workflows and employment templates exist, payroll runs with an external partner, and a job architecture is drafted. What's missing is someone who owns all of it day to day and makes it better. The role is a generalist, with room to grow: depending on your strengths and interests, it can develop toward a People Lead role or a specialization such as Talent Acquisition or People Operations. Candidates, new joiners and colleagues meet you in our Munich office, so we expect you on-site.

Responsibilities

Recruiting & Hiring

- Own recruiting from open role to signed contract: align with hiring managers on the profile, write and publish job ads, source actively, screen candidates and run first-round interviews
- Organize interview loops and onsite days, and keep every candidate informed so that nobody waits a week without hearing from us
- Make hiring repeatable: structured interview guides, scorecards, clean pipeline data in Personio, and a weekly overview of every open role for the founders
- Steer external recruiters and job platforms where they add value
- Shape how Hive Robotics shows up as an employer: careers page, job ads, and our presence at universities and relevant events

Onboarding & Employee Lifecycle

- Own onboarding from signed contract to the end of probation: a clear plan for the first weeks, introductions, regular check-ins and probation reviews on time
- Run joiner / mover / leaver in Personio, which drives account provisioning together with our IT team: a new hire is ready on day one, a leaver is offboarded cleanly
- Be the first point of contact for people questions from the team

People Operations & Payroll

- Prepare employment contracts and amendments (salary, role, working time), confirmations, references and terminations, based on our templates and with external counsel where needed
- Prepare monthly payroll inputs and be the counterpart for our external payroll and tax advisors: you don't run payroll yourself, you make sure what goes into it is right
- Administer benefits such as mobility allowances, and keep employee data, absences and documents in Personio complete and audit-ready
- Keep us compliant on the people side: employee data protection, working time recording, documentation duties, and the upcoming pay transparency requirements
- Make sure the steps our export control and security procedures require are part of every hiring process, including security vetting where customer projects call for it

Talent Management & Structures

- Help roll out our job architecture: map roles to grades and tracks, maintain salary bands, and keep both consistent as we grow
- Prepare and run performance and compensation review cycles with leadership
- Build the people processes a growing company needs, and document them so they work without you in the room

Requirements

This is a broad role, and we know that. You do not need to have mastered every topic from day one. If you bring solid experience in recruiting and HR administration and the drive to grow into the rest, we want to hear from you.

Must Have

- Around 3 to 5 years in HR or People roles, ideally as a generalist or in recruiting, in a startup or scale-up
- Hands-on experience running full-cycle recruiting yourself, including active sourcing, ideally also for technical roles
- Solid working knowledge of German employment law and HR administration: contracts and amendments, payroll inputs, social security, probation and notice periods
- Hands-on experience with an HR system, Personio strongly preferred
- Candidate-first mindset: you treat a candidate waiting for feedback as a problem, not a backlog item
- Structured working style: you document what you build, so processes keep running when you're not in the room
- Discretion and sound judgment with confidential information about people and pay
- Fluent German and English: contracts and payroll run in German, the team works in English
- Based in Munich or willing to relocate

Nice to Have

- Experience in deep tech, hardware, defence, aerospace or another regulated environment
- Experience hiring engineers (hardware, embedded, RF or software)
- Exposure to grading, job architecture or compensation frameworks
- Experience with international hiring or teams employed in more than one country
- Experience building a People function from scratch rather than inheriting one