Senior Manager, People Operations

Our Story and Purpose Linden Lab develops platforms that empower people to create, connect, and thrive through transformative virtual experiences. Since 1999, we’ve been at the forefront of the creator economy, building durable spaces for limitless imagination, self-expression, and human connection. In 2003, we launched Second Life , a vibrant, user-driven virtual world that has grown into a global community with over two billion user creations and a flourishing $650 million economy. People build relationships, express themselves, create together, and, for those who choose, build real livelihoods through their creativity. Unlike traditional social media, Second Life fosters sustained connection between strangers and offers mobility, agency, belonging, collaboration, and shared purpose to people whose real-world circumstances may limit their options. For many, it is not just a platform, but a place to participate fully and authentically. At Linden Lab, the same principles that shape our communities guide how we work together. We value diverse perspectives, strengths-based leadership, and the belief that we do our best work together. You’ll join a thoughtful, mission-driven team where you can grow, contribute meaningfully, and help shape technology with real social impact. We invite you to come as you are. Work Location This role requires working onsite in our San Francisco office for full workdays Monday through Thursday. Employees have the flexibility to work remotely or from the office on Fridays as part of their regular five day workweek. Your Mission We’re looking for a Senior Manager, People Operations to take ownership of the day-to-day work that powers the employee experience and keep raising the bar for how we deliver it. Reporting to our Director, People & Culture, you’ll lead the operational work while helping us continually improve how it gets done. We believe the best People teams create leverage. Our impact isn’t measured by how much work flows through our team, but by how much easier we make it for the organization to operate effectively. We remove friction, create clarity, and build systems that help people move faster, make better decisions, and focus on high value work. You won’t be joining a team that needs convincing to challenge an existing process or try a new approach. We want you to question what exists, improve it, and bring us the ideas we haven’t thought of yet. How You’ll Grow With Us You’ll sharpen your judgment and expand how you think about People Operations work by partnering with a team that challenges the status quo, asks why, and expects you to bring your own point of view. You’ll learn to move quickly without sacrificing thoughtfulness, question established approaches, and turn better ideas into better ways of working. From the start, you’ll gain exposure to the thinking behind organizational priorities and People decisions, working closely with senior People leaders and participating in strategy conversations. You’ll build experience navigating the harder parts of the work, where there isn’t always an obvious answer and judgment, empathy, business context, and employee experience all have to be weighed together. You’ll also deepen your capabilities in AI, automation, workflow design, systems, and integrations, with the support and room to experiment, test new approaches, and turn your ideas into improvements you can actually see. The Impact You’ll Drive Run the day-to-day People Operations function, owning operational execution and ensuring the work is accurate, timely, compliant, and delivers a consistently high-quality employee experience. Lead payroll administration and the execution of approved compensation changes across our multi-state workforce, maintaining strong controls and resolving issues quickly and accurately. Oversee and execute benefits, retirement plan, employee leave, and workers’ compensation administration, balancing technical precision and compliance with an experience that makes complex programs easier for employees to navigate. Lead the employee lifecycle from pre-onboarding through offboarding, bringing together systems, logistics, communications, manager readiness, employee changes, and key milestones to create a seamless, high-quality experience. Drive continuous improvement across the function, using systems thinking, data, and feedback to identify root causes, simplify complexity, strengthen self-service, and design out recurring problems. Design and build automated workflows that eliminate unnecessary manual work, improve handoffs, prevent errors, and create leverage across the People function, turning opportunities for automation into working solutions. Optimize our People systems, including Paylocity, maintaining exceptional data integrity and finding better ways for our technology, data, and workflows to work together. Develop and analyze People metrics, dashboards, and reporting to surface workforce trends, employee insights, emerging risks, and opportunities, translating data into actionable recommendations for People leadership. Drive recurring compliance and audit work, including retirement plan administration, worker classification, payroll and state tax requirements, employee records, and other regulatory obligations, translating changing requirements into reliable processes and controls. Advise employees and managers on policies, benefits, leaves, performance processes, and day-to-day employee matters, applying strong judgment and recognizing when an issue requires broader People leadership involvement. Hire, manage, and develop a People Operations team member, building their expertise, judgment, confidence, and ownership while creating strong shared context, cross-training, and continuity across the function. Proactively surface meaningful trends, risks, decisions, and progress to People leadership, bringing the right context and thoughtful recommendations so leaders have what they need to make informed decisions. Shape broader People initiatives and strategy through your functional expertise, data, and proximity to the work, helping us build programs, systems, and employee experiences that are as strong in execution as they are in design. How You’ll Shape Our Future At Linden, we celebrate all dimensions of diversity, including diversity of experience. Candidates will be most successful if they bring: 7+ years of progressive People Operations experience, with deep, hands-on expertise across payroll, benefits, leaves, compliance, HR systems, and the employee lifecycle, including experience supporting a multi-state workforce and strong knowledge of California requirements. 3+ years of experience directly managing and developing others, with the ability to create clarity, build capability and judgment, delegate meaningful ownership, and maintain a consistently high bar for the work. A systems-thinking mindset and a track record of looking beyond the immediate task to understand root causes, dependencies, downstream impacts, and opportunities to build better ways of working. Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to communicate effectively across the organization and manage up by anticipating what leaders need to know, proactively surfacing relevant context, progress, and risks, and bringing thoughtful recommendations. Demonstrated experience designing and building process automations and workflows that meaningfully change how work gets done, using automation, AI, integrations, or no-code/low-code tools to reduce manual effort, prevent errors, and create leverage. Strong analytical and program management skills, with the ability to use data to spot patterns and inform decisions while bringing structure to complex, cross-functional work and driving it through successful implementation. Exceptional execution capacity and a strong sense of urgency. You can manage a high volume of work and competing priorities, keep things moving, close loops, and maintain a high bar for accuracy and quality along the way. Exceptional resourcefulness and self-directed learning skills. You know how to get yourself up to speed, find the right information, learn unfamiliar systems and requirements, and confidently jump into problems you haven’t encountered before. We’ll help you learn Linden’s context and ways of working; you’ll bring the functional expertise to take it from there. Excellent judgment, with the ability to navigate ambiguity, develop a point of view, make sound decisions within your scope, and recognize when something genuinely requires escalation. High emotional intelligence and discretion, particularly when helping employees navigate sensitive or complex situations. A continuous-improvement mindset and genuine curiosity about new tools, practices, and possibilities. You’re energized by making things better and expect your own skills and the systems around you to keep evolving. If you don’t meet every requirement listed for this role, we still encourage you to apply. Too often, the confidence gap or imposter syndrome keeps exceptional candidates from taking the leap—and we don’t want that to hold you back. If you believe in our mission and in your ability to make an impact, we want to hear from you! The Fine Print Pay Transparency Notice Linden Lab’s Total Rewar