Senior Human Resources Business Partner

Our Mission and Opportunity Early education is one of the most important determinants of childhood outcomes, a critical support for working families, and a $175B market that remains underserved by modern technology. Brightwheel is the largest, fastest growing, and most loved platform in early ed, trusted by millions of educators and families every day. We are a three-time Cloud 100 company https://www.forbes.com/lists/cloud100/a, backed by top investors including Addition, Bessemer, Emerson Collective, Lowercase Capital, Notable Capital, and Mark Cuban. Our Team Our team is passionate, talented, and customer-focused. We embody our Leadership Principles https://mybrightwheel.com/about/ in our work and culture. We are a distributed team with remote employees across every US time zone, as well as select offices in the US and internationally. Who You Are You've built real depth across HR domains — performance, employee relations, compensation, employee experience — and you know the trade-offs of each well enough to choose the right one for the situation in front of you, not just the one you've used before. You earn trust fast, whether you're coaching a first-time manager or advising a member of the executive team, and you're just as comfortable stepping into a new org as staying in your lane. You default to principles over rules — you can explain why a policy exists and know when it's right to flex it. You're genuinely curious about better ways of working, including how AI can help you and your stakeholders move faster, and you take ownership of ambiguous problems instead of waiting to be told what to do. What You'll Do - Serve as the primary HR partner for a portfolio of corporate orgs, working directly with Directors, VPs, and members of the executive team on performance, employee relations, compensation, career development, and workforce planning - Lead our annual review calibration, promotion, and merit cycle for your assigned orgs — from prep through facilitation to final outcomes - Coach and develop managers to build a high-performance, accountable, and inclusive team culture, including navigating hard performance conversations - Advise on complex employee relations situations, balancing what's right for the employee with what's right for the business - Own strategic initiatives with your stakeholders — identifying the problem, aligning stakeholders, structuring options and solutions, and driving the outcome aligned to a business priority - Design HR processes and frameworks that hold up beyond your own portfolio — solving root causes, not just symptoms - Use AI tools to accelerate your own work — from ER documentation to policy drafting to workforce planning — and help raise the bar for how the broader People team works - Model strong HRBP partnership for your teammates, informally mentoring and sharing what's working What You've Done - Experience as an HRBP in a fast-moving tech environment, partnering with a diverse set of stakeholders and business problems - A track record of leading — not just supporting — a calibration, promotion, or merit cycle, ideally in a high-performance culture - Comfort advising and coaching leaders up through the executive level, including through difficult or high-stakes conversations - A track record of owning a strategic initiative end-to-end for a business leader — from problem definition through execution - A history of designing or improving an HR process, not only executing existing ones - Genuine curiosity about AI and new tools — you don't need to be an expert, but you try things and iterate What Sets You Apart - You've used AI to build a real, scaled workflow improvement — not just experimented with a chatbot - You've navigated a genuinely messy calibration or performance case (conflicting data, an underdeveloped process, a hard people call) and can talk through how you diagnosed skill vs. will and chose your approach - You've changed a leader's mind through data and judgment, not au…