People Partner Lead, Germany & Sweden

Why this role exists

You’ll help build Neko’s clinical organisation in Germany from the ground up, and then lead the people strategy that helps it scale.

Neko’s clinics are where our mission comes to life. The experience members have is shaped by the teams behind it, making the organisation itself one of the most important products we build. In Germany, this organisation doesn’t exist yet. Before the first clinic opens, you’ll help define clinical roles, workforce planning, compensation, and the employee experience that attracts exceptional talent. Then, as clinics launch and grow, you’ll partner with leaders to ensure those teams perform, develop, and scale successfully.

This is a rare opportunity to build an organisation from day one – and to shape what it becomes as Neko brings prevention-first healthcare to another market.

Phase one: build the foundation, pre-launch

• Ensure the German employment framework is appropriately set up with legal, external counsel, key internal teams, like People Ops and Workforce Planning – contracts, working-time and rostering models, pay structures, policies, payroll and people systems

• Design the clinic organisation from a blank sheet, and a staffing model sized to Neko’s ambition for the market rather than to the first clinic

• Own the launch workforce plan, the cover and contracting model, and reward in a German context – pay, pension, equity

• Build a German clinical employer proposition from zero with TA, and a playbook the next market can reuse

Build for German employment structures from day one

• Design workforce policies (scheduling, pay, performance) with German labor law and employee representation requirements in mind from the start

• Work with legal counsel to determine the right structure for German clinic operations

• Ensure people systems and tools are built to comply with German labor regulations

Phase two: run clinical people strategy live

• Be the day-to-day People partner across German clinical leadership, from senior operations and medical leaders through to frontline clinic managers

• Spend real time in clinics, and read what members experience there as signal about how teams are resourced, structured and led – spotting strain, inconsistency or risk early, because it usually shows up in the clinic room before it shows up in the data

• Coach clinic leaders through hiring, performance and the conversations that are hard but important – and build the leadership capability and multi-way feedback culture that keep employee relations issues from piling up, while supporting teams and leaders through the ones that do

• Support first-time clinic managers as they build confidence, capability and steady leadership habits

• Hold the staffing model against the growth plan: German absence, leave and part-time realities, the clinical qualification and mobility pipeline, and honesty when the plan and the labour market disagree

• Turn central People programmes into clinic-ready practice, and call out where a centralised approach misses frontline reality

• Revisit what you built pre-launch as clinics run, and put data and AI to work in how the People agenda actually operates – sharper decisions, less manual effort, more time on the judgement calls

• Take change from decision to genuine adoption, bringing clinic teams with you without pausing delivery to do it

Beyond Germany

• Help drive the global People Partner team’s clinical strategy rather than just feed into it

• Bring the German clinical reality into that team's agenda, so decisions made at scale hold up on the ground

• Support the wider European market as it grows, and other markets as needed

What you bring

• 8+ years as a senior People or HR Business Partner leader, across senior levels of leadership and frontline leaders of larger teams

• A builder's mindset – comfortable starting from a blank sheet, having opened or scaled operations in Germany or built a German people function from close to nothing

• Deep, practical command of German employment law and co-determination, with the judgement to know when to bring in counsel

• Germany is the core requirement; multi-market European experience is strongly preferred – you have worked across more than one European employment landscape (Sweden a significant plus) and know what scales beyond a single market

• Has built a staffing model that had to scale on an opening cadence, and has localised reward in Germany – pay, pension, equity

• Comfortable in both phases – the ambiguity of pre-launch and the discipline of running something live

• Moves at the pace of the business and leads people through change – you have taken teams through reorganisations, new operating models or rapid scaling, and kept trust and delivery intact while doing it

• A local delivery mandate and a real seat in cross-market strategy, held at the same time, at pace

• Fluent with people data and using AI in your own work, and ties people decisions to what members actually experience in the room

• Fluent German and English, based in Berlin, and ready to spend regular time in clinics