Senior Manager - Human Resources

Location: Chennai

Experience: 8 - 12 years

Preferred Background: MBA / PGDM in HR from a top-tier B-school

Industry Preference: Ecommerce / D2C / Consumer / High-growth startup

Employment Type: Full-time

About the Role:

We are looking for a Senior Manager - Human Resources who can help build a high-performance, high-trust organization as The Indus Valley scales.

This is a hands-on HR leadership role covering talent acquisition, performance management, culture, organization development, employee relations, compensation and HR operations.

You should have experience working in a fast-paced ecommerce, D2C or consumer business and be comfortable partnering closely with leadership while also driving execution on the ground.

You should be comfortable with analytics and take number-based decisions. You should be able to build simple dashboards for key metrics and build solid business use cases.

You must manage P&L for people metrics.

Most importantly, we are looking for someone with high integrity, maturity, sound judgement and the ability to build trust across the organization.

What You'll Do:

Talent & Workforce Planning:

- Own hiring across leadership, managerial and critical functional roles.

- Build strong talent pipelines and improve quality and speed of hiring.

- Drive manpower planning and workforce budgeting with business leaders.

- Track hiring metrics including time to hire, offer acceptance and recruitment funnel effectiveness.

- Partner with functional leaders to identify capability and organization needs ahead of growth.

Performance Management:

- Drive the company-wide OKR and performance management process.

- Ensure company goals translate into clear individual and team objectives.

- Lead appraisal cycles, feedback discussions and Performance Improvement Plans.

- Build fair, transparent and measurable performance systems linked to career progression and rewards.

- Coach managers on goal setting, feedback and difficult performance conversations.

Culture & Organization Development:

- Play a key role in defining, communicating and reinforcing company culture.

- Ensure our values are reflected in who we hire, reward, promote and retain.

- Build initiatives that strengthen ownership, accountability, transparency and collaboration.

- Support organization design, role clarity, career paths, competency frameworks and succession planning.

- Lead change-management initiatives as the organization grows and evolves.

- Build meaningful employee engagement and retention programs.

HR Operations, Compliance & Employee Relations:

- Ensure HR policies and processes are practical, scalable and compliant.

- Partner with internal and external teams to ensure adherence to employment and labour regulations.

- Manage employee grievances and sensitive people matters fairly and confidentially.

- Build strong HR SOPs and governance without unnecessary bureaucracy.

- Support HR requirements across corporate, warehouse and operational teams.

- Where relevant, oversee contract manpower, attendance, productivity and manpower partners.

Compensation & People Analytics:

- Support compensation benchmarking, salary structures, increments and retention decisions.

- Ensure rewards are aligned with performance and market benchmarks.

- Use HR metrics and dashboards to identify people trends and drive better decisions.

- Track hiring, attrition, attendance, performance, manpower cost and other key people metrics.

- You must manage P&L for people metrics.

Build the HR Team:

- Lead, coach and develop the HR team.

- Set clear priorities, ownership and operating rhythms.

- Build an HR function that is responsive, credible and strongly connected to the business.

What We're Looking For:

- 8 - 12 years of progressive HR experience, preferably in ecommerce, D2C, consumer internet or a high-growth company.

- Strong experience in talent acquisition, PMS, culture building and HR business partnering.

- Exposure to organization development, compensation, employee relations and HR operations.

- Experience working with leadership teams and managing multiple stakeholders.

- Strong understanding of people metrics and comfort working with data.

- Ability to create structure without slowing down a fast-moving organization.

- Strong communication, influencing and conflict-resolution skills.

- Comfortable operating in a fast-paced, high-ownership and evolving environment.

- High levels of integrity, confidentiality, fairness and personal credibility.

- Strong execution orientation and willingness to remain hands-on.

You'll Do Well Here If:

- You believe HR should help both people and the business perform better.

- You understand that culture is not an HR event. It is reflected every day in who we hire, how we behave, what we reward and what we do not tolerate.

- You can be empathetic without avoiding difficult decisions.

- You can move between a senior leadership discussion, a hiring review, an employee conversation and a performance dashboard comfortably.

- You are willing to challenge leaders when required and equally willing to hold employees accountable fairly.

- You build processes because they solve a problem - not because HR is expected to have a process.

- Most importantly, people trust you because you are consistent, fair and high on integrity.