Head of People & Culture

Curewiki operates a patient-initiated clinical research discovery platform live across Europe. We're vendor-cleared at top-tier pharma sponsors and CROs, our hospital footprint is expanding through EU interoperability initiatives, and we're building out our commercial organisation right now — multiple senior and country-level roles open at once, across several countries, with a strict A-player bar. That build doesn't happen without someone who owns it.

As Head of People & Culture, you'll own everything about how Curewiki hires, develops, rewards, and retains its people across a remote, multi-country European team. This is a player-coach role by design: you'll personally run the searches that matter most, while building the people infrastructure a scaling company needs — from multi-country employment setups to a compensation and equity framework to a performance rhythm that keeps the A-bar real after the offer is signed.

Your responsibilities:

Talent acquisition
- Own the hiring engine end to end: open-role portfolio, search strategy per role, and pipeline health, personally driving the most senior and hardest searches
- Run the hiring process as promised in every posting: fast, transparent, evidence-based, with feedback at every step, completed in weeks rather than months
- Hold the A-player bar in every process — evidence over titles and degrees, and the courage to keep a seat empty rather than fill it with a B
- Build the employer brand that makes A-players come to us

People operations & employment infrastructure
- Own employment setup across our European footprint: contracts, EOR/entity decisions per country, and compliant onboarding wherever the right person lives
- Run core people operations with our part-time HR support and external providers: payroll coordination, social security administration, absence, and policies
- Make onboarding a weapon: new hires productive in days, with clear 90-day expectations from day one

Compensation & equity architecture
- Build Curewiki's compensation framework: bands per role and level, benchmarked for the European markets we hire in, with a clear transparency philosophy

Performance, development & culture
- Install a lightweight performance rhythm: clear goals, honest feedback, development conversations that actually happen
- Build development around strengths, with stretch assignments and promotion paths earned by outcomes
- Own culture deliberately in a remote, multi-country company
- Act as coach and confidential sounding board for leadership on team design and organisational decisions

AI-first people function
- Run the people function AI-first: sourcing, screening support, documentation, and analytics leveraged with modern tooling, with human judgment where it counts most

Requirements

- You've owned the people function through this exact stage before: scaling from a small core team to a multi-country organisation — and can show what you built and what broke without you
- You've personally closed senior hires (not just coordinated them), and can walk us through the last two: how you found them, what nearly lost them, how you won
- You know European employment across borders: you've set up or run employment in multiple EU countries, and know when to use an EOR vs. open an entity, and what each costs
- You've built a compensation and equity framework from scratch (or rebuilt a broken one) and can defend the design choices
- You're a genuine player-coach: happiest owning the work directly, building systems as you go, hiring your own team only when volume truly demands it
- You run AI-first and can show how it's changed the way you work
- Fluent professional English

Nice to have
- Experience in healthtech, life sciences, or another regulated industry
- Experience supporting a company through a financing round and the team scaling that follows
- Familiarity with Belgian employment and social security specifics

Benefits
- Remote work within the EU, with a Belgium-based preference
- A player-coach mandate: real ownership from day one, not administration of someone else's decisions
- Direct access to and partnership with the Founder & CEO and leadership team — you're treated as co-architect of the organisation
- A fast, transparent hiring process (and yes, the same process you'll run for others is run on you): intro call, founder deep-dive, practical working session, COO conversation, references — feedback at every step, completed in weeks not months
- A high-velocity, mission-driven team that writes things down, moves fast, and takes AI leverage as a baseline in every role
- The chance to build the people function of a healthtech scale-up from the ground up, across multiple countries