People Partner

About Black Forest Labs

We're the team behind Latent Diffusion, Stable Diffusion, and FLUX—foundational technologies that changed how the world creates images and video. We’re creating the generative models that power how people make images and video—tools used by millions of creators, developers, and businesses worldwide. Our FLUX models are among the most advanced in the world, and we're just getting started.

Headquartered in Freiburg, Germany with a growing presence in San Francisco, we're scaling fast while staying true to what makes us different: research excellence, open science, and building technology that expands human creativity.

Why This Role

You'll split your time between People Partnering and People Operations, with that balance shifting toward more partnering as we grow and the ops layer matures. You'll report into the Head of People and work closely with our existing EU People team member, taking the lead on partnering and providing guidance on ops quality and approach.

This role suits someone who can hold a room with senior leaders, thinks commercially, and isn't too precious to roll up their sleeves when it matters. Your background might be in HR, Operations, Consulting, or Programme Management; what matters more is that you bring good judgement, a genuine interest in the people function, and the self-awareness to know what you don't yet know. Tech experience is essential, you'll be supporting engineers, researchers, and commercial teams, and you need to understand how they think.

What You’ll Work On

People Partnering

• Serve as a key People Partner for EU-based managers and employees, providing support across performance, team effectiveness, and organisational design
• Coach and develop managers across the org, building leadership capability as we scale
• Own compensation strategy inputs and lead key employee lifecycle moments, performance cycles, promotions, difficult conversations
• Lead employee relations matters in the EU with sound judgement and solid knowledge of German employment law; know when to escalate to external counsel
• Be a trusted presence at HQ, the person leaders come to before a situation becomes a problem

People Operations

• Set the standard for people ops quality in Europe; not doing everything yourself, but ensuring it's done well
• Provide guidance to our EU Ops and People Partner, supporting their development and ensuring execution quality
• Use data, tooling and AI to make People Ops smooth and scalable, spot inefficiencies and fix them
• Own your portion of the People roadmap, from design through to delivery

What We’re Looking For

• 7+ years of experience in People, Operations, Consulting, Programme Management, or a related field; with meaningful HR exposure and a genuine interest in building the people function
• Experience working in tech; deep tech (AI, infrastructure, developer tooling, fintech, or similar)
• Must have startup or scale-up experience, you know what it feels like to build, and seek out opportunities to build new processes or significantly improving existing processes
• Comfortable moving between strategic thinking and hands-on execution
• Strong coaching instincts with the credibility to influence senior stakeholders
• Strong communication skills with fluency in German and English

While not required, it’s an added plus if you also have:

• Formal HR qualification
• Prior experience as founding or lead People hire in an early-stage or scaling environment
• Working knowledge of German employment law
• Exposure to cross-border or multi-entity employment in Europe
• Coaching qualification or structured leadership development experience

How We Work Together

We’re a distributed team with real offices that people actually use. Depending on your role, you’ll either join us in Freiburg or SF at least 2 days a week (or one full week every other week), or work remotely with a monthly in-person week to stay connected. We’ll cover reasonable travel costs to make this possible. We think in-person time matters, and we’ve structured things to make it accessible to all. We’ll discuss what this will look like for the role during our interview process.

Everything we do is grounded in four values:

• Obsessed. We are a frontier research lab. The science has to be right, the understanding deep, the product beautiful.
• Low Ego. The work speaks. The best idea wins, no matter who said it. Credit is shared. Nobody is above any task.
• Bold. We take the ambitious bet. We ship, we do not wait for conditions to be perfect.
• Kind. People over politics. We treat each other with genuine warmth. Agency without empathy creates chaos.

If this sounds like work you’d enjoy, we’d love to hear from you.

Base Annual Salary:

€100,000 - €130,000 + Equity