People Director, US

About Ethos

Ethos is a leading life insurance technology company on a mission to protect families by democratizing access to life insurance and empowering agents at scale. With its robust three-sided technology platform, Ethos is transforming the life insurance experience for consumers, agents, and carriers alike. Ethos offers instant, accessible products and a seamless online process that requires no medical exams and just a few health questions; it eliminates traditional barriers, making it easier than ever for everyone to protect their families. Ethos is redefining how life insurance is bought, sold, and underwritten.

About the role

The People Team’s mission is to build the systems, talent, and culture that drive business performance where everyone prospers. This role sits at the center of this work and operates in the business close up. As our US-based senior HR expert, you will be the connective tissue between our people strategy and day-to-day business execution, ensuring managers have the tools, data, answers, and support they need to make fast, confident people decisions. The ideal candidate brings 15+ years of progressive HR experience and thrives in the detail while driving us to scale with each project. You are equally comfortable in an executive leadership discussion about metrics that matter and in the weeds of helping a manager navigate a performance issue by the end of the day. You are relentlessly curious about what the data is telling you, and you use AI not as a novelty but as a core part of how you operate. Critically, you know how to work through and with HR Operations and Talent Acquisition to get things done — translating business needs into clear requirements and holding the system accountable to speed and quality.

Duties and Responsibilities

Strategic HR Partnership & Business Performance

• Partner with executive and senior leadership to drive their organization’s needs to keep the business moving quickly and efficiently.
• Serve as a trusted, decisive advisor to executives on organizational effectiveness, headcount decisions, and change management - with a bias toward speed and clarity for all stakeholders.
• Maintain a constant pulse on organizational health - turnover trends, performance distribution, hiring velocity, engagement signals - and surface insights before they become problems.
• Partner with HR Operations to build and maintain people dashboards that give leaders real-time visibility into the health of their teams, enabling faster and better-informed decisions at every level.
• Translate business goals into people strategies with clear owners, timelines, and measurable outcomes - not just frameworks.
• Advocate for strategies and initiatives that create an engaging work environment across hiring, performance, and promotion decisions - tracked with data and held to the same accountability standards as any business metric.

Manager Enablement & Talent Operations

• Be the go-to HR expert for managers of our US workforce - providing fast, practical guidance on hiring, performance, development, and difficult people situations.
• Identify where managers are struggling, where teams are underperforming, and where early intervention can change outcomes - then work with HR Operations to build the tools and processes that address those gaps at scale.
• Partner with the Global HR leaders to enable managers through enablement and skills development.
• Ensure performance management is a driver of real business outcomes - recognition and performance improvement that connects directly to company priorities, development plans that accelerate productivity.
• Design onboarding frameworks that complement operational onboarding to get new hires to productivity faster.