Fractional People Operations Lead

Engagement Details

• Role: Fractional People Operations Lead (People Ops / HRBP)

• Structure: Month to month, starting at approximately 2 days per week (16 to 20 hours). Expected to grow toward full-time as headcount and scope justify it.

• Reports to: CEO

• Location: Remote. GTA preferred for periodic in-person time at the Burlington office and warehouse. Canada or US considered.

• Travel: Occasional. At least one field site visit in the first 90 days is expected.

• Start: Immediately

About Company

The company is a drone geophysical survey and AI interpretation company serving mineral and energy explorers across Canada and internationally. We fly magnetics, EM, LiDAR, radiometrics and hyperspectral, build the drone systems that carry those sensors, and interpret the data. We are founder-led, profitable, and have no outside investors.

Headcount is 50 to 60 people across Canada and Argentina, with a target of 80 within the next year. The team is predominantly remote with in-person engineering, warehousing and field roles. Field crews deploy on rotation to remote sites, often for weeks at a time, in demanding conditions.

We recruit A-players and expect them to give their all. That is exactly why this role exists: high performers burn out if the organization does not know what they need, and they leave if they do not feel heard.

The Mandate

This is not a compliance role. Compliance is the floor, not the job.

The job is to build the people foundation that lets us scale without losing what makes it work. Concretely, that means three things:

1. Understand our people through and through. Know every person in the company: their role, skills, working style, communication preferences, what motivates them, and where they want to go. Use that understanding to pair people well, structure teams, and surface friction before it becomes attrition. This is the raw material for everything else in the role.

2. Empower managers to take care of their people. Managers own their teams. This role does not take that from them. It gives them the structure, tools and support to do it well: clear leadership expectations, clear decision rights so people are not waiting for sign-off, coaching on hard conversations, and a second set of eyes when something is off. Culture starts with management, so the first customer of this role is the leadership team, including the CEO.

3. Build a culture where everyone has a voice. Every person should be able to give feedback, raise a concern, or push back without fear of consequence, and should know where that voice goes and what happens to it. Build the mechanisms that make this real: feedback loops, review cadence, pulse checks, escalation paths, and follow-through.

Scope of Work

People understanding and alignment - Build and maintain a living picture of the team: roles, skills, strengths, working styles, career goals, and capacity. - Run structured one-on-ones and skip-levels across the org to hear what is working and what is not. - Support team composition and pairing decisions with that understanding. - Keep every role connected to our mission and values so effort compounds toward the collective goal instead of fragmenting.

Manager enablement - Define what good leadership looks like in writing, and hold managers to it. - Coach managers on feedback, delegation, decision rights, performance conversations and development planning. - Give managers early signals on their teams so they can act before problems escalate. - Partner with the CEO on leadership team dynamics and accountability.

Culture, feedback and cadence - Design and run the feedback system: regular pulse checks, annual and mid-year reviews, exit and stay interviews, and the follow-through that closes the loop. - Build communication and collaboration rhythms that work for a distributed team across two countries and multiple time zones. - Own the employee value proposition: what it means to work here, why the right people should join, and why they stay.

Field operations and sustainability - Understand what field work actually demands. Spend time with crews. Know the rotation, the travel load, the isolation, and the pressure of tight survey windows. - Set the standards for rotation length, rest, and support that make us industry-leading for field staff, and make sure they are viable for the business. - Monitor workload and burnout risk across the company. Flag it early. We want to push limits without breaking people, and this role holds that line.

Employee lifecycle - Onboarding that gets people productive and connected fast, remote or in the field. - Career path mapping so people know what growth looks like from day one. - Role clarity: every person knows what they own, what decisions are theirs, and what success looks like. - Offboarding that is respectful and captures what we can learn.

Recruitment support - Own the hiring process and pipeline for non-executive roles: requisition definition, job descriptions, interview design, candidate experience, offers. - Build the employment brand so that over time direct applicants replace agency reliance. - Direct sourcing and screening volume is not the core of this role at 2 days per week. If that becomes the need, scope and hours are revisited.

HR foundation - Get the basics right and keep them right: policies, employment agreements, compliance across Ontario and other provinces, benefits administration, HRIS. - Manage the contractor side cleanly: agreements, onboarding and engagement for the Argentina team and other contractors, and clear boundaries on employee versus contractor classification as the team grows. - Bring in subject matter experts (payroll, benefits, employment law) where it is cheaper and better than doing it in-house.

First 90 Days

Days 1 to 30: Listen Meet the CEO, the leadership team, and a broad cross-section of employees including field crews, engineering, data science, sales and operations. Review how roles, communication and decision-making actually work in practice versus on paper. Visit at least one field site or crew rotation if the schedule allows.

Output by day 30: a candid read on the health of the organization. Strengths, risks, friction points, and where pressure is building. Delivered to the CEO and leadership team.

Days 31 to 60: Synthesize Turn what was heard into priorities. Define what matters most over the next 12 months from a people standpoint. Draft leadership expectations. Identify quick wins that can land immediately. Propose the feedback and review cadence.

Output by day 60: a 12-month people roadmap the leadership team has agreed to, with clear owners and sequencing.

Days 61 to 90: Enable Start executing. Roll out the first cadence (pulse check, one-on-one structure, or review cycle). Begin manager coaching. Stand up the recruitment process. Close the highest-risk compliance gaps.

Output by day 90: the first systems are live, managers know what is expected of them, and there is a working plan for the remaining roadmap.

Who Fits This Role

• People operations or HRBP background in a growth-stage company. Has built a people function where none existed before.

• Hands-on operator at the manager to director level. Executes independently. Does not need a team to get things done.

• Has coached managers and has the standing to push back on senior leadership, including the CEO, when something is wrong.

• Comfortable with a distributed, multi-country workforce and with the realities of field-based work. Experience in mining, energy, construction, aviation or another rotational field industry is a strong asset.

• Direct communicator. Reads people well. Can hold a hard conversation without softening it into nothing.

• Practical about compliance. Gets it done and moves on to the work that matters.

• Understands that culture is built by systems and follow-through, not by events and slogans.

What Success Looks Like

By the end of the first 90 days: - Every employee has been heard, and the leadership team has a written read on the organization. - Leadership expectations are defined and agreed. - A 12-month people roadmap exists with owners. - The first feedback cadence is running.

By the end of the first year: - Managers make people decisions with confidence and without waiting for the CEO. - Employees can point to where their voice goes and can name something that changed because of it. - Field rotation and workload standards are documented and holding. - Onboarding is structured, career paths are mapped, and role clarity is the norm. - Headcount grows toward 80 with cost per hire on target and a growing share of direct applicants. - Voluntary attrition among high performers is near zero.