HR Director

Data Science UA is a service company with deep expertise in AI and Data Science. Our story started in 2016 with the first Data Science UA Conference in Kyiv, and since then, we've built one of the largest AI communities in Europe.

About the Role:
We are looking for a HR Director to the client’s team.

We are looking for someone who has already modernised a legacy HR function in a comparable organisation — and who works at pace. We expect visible, measurable change within the first two quarters, not a twelve-month discovery exercise.

Responsibilities:
- Organisational design and workforce planning.
- Establish a unified organisational structure: levels, grading, role titles, job architecture.
- Own workforce planning together with business line leaders.
- Analyze payroll cost by function, benchmark against market and manage its share of total cost.
- Design and implement the group incentive framework, including the redesign of commercial and sales bonus schemes.
- Link variable pay to measurable outcomes and cascade targets through management levels.
- Build grading and salary bands, define the pay review policy.
- Model the financial impact of every scheme change before rollout.
- Introduce a regular performance and feedback cycle across the organisation.
- Support the rollout of the group performance management system: linking company, function and individual objectives.
- Establish accountability for end-to-end business processes, not only for functional tasks.
- Implement an HR business partner model aligned to the group's directorates.
- Design onboarding, development, internal mobility and exit processes.
- Modernise HR systems and data: HRIS, self-service, reporting.
- People analytics: attrition, cost of hire, programme effectiveness, workforce cost.
- Learning framework for both frontline and management populations.
- Leadership development for team leads, department heads and business line directors.
- Employer brand, jointly with the Head of Recruitment.

Requirements:
Must have:
- 10+ years in HR, including 4+ years leading the function in an organisation of 500+ employees.
- Demonstrable experience modernising a legacy or administrative HR function — moving it from record-keeping to a data-driven, business-facing directorate.
- Deep compensation and benefits expertise: personally designed and implemented incentive schemes, including for commercial and sales populations.
- Hands-on command of modern HR frameworks: job architecture and grading, competency models, performance cycles, workforce planning, people analytics.
- Experience implementing or replacing an HRIS and building HR reporting.
- Commercial and financial literacy: able to model payroll cost and the economics of people decisions.
- Experience leading organisational change against internal resistance
- Team leadership of 5+ HR professionals.
- Working English.

Nice to have:
- Financial services, retail network, telecom or another business with a distributed footprint and large frontline population
- Experience supporting entry into new jurisdictions
- Experience integrating or consolidating HR functions after restructuring

What the client offers:
- A genuine mandate to rebuild the function, not to maintain it
- Direct reporting line to the CEO and a seat at the management committee
- Budget and authority to build the team
- A group in a growth phase with international expansion under way