[Hiring] VP of People @Higher People

Role Description

You'll be our first dedicated people leader, bringing ground-up experience and real weight to an executive seat, with the room to make your mark across the business. We’re growing fast, and need a powerhouse leader to ensure our culture is and stays strong across our complex business with a variety of employee types and needs. You’ll diagnose the existing pros and cons across onboarding, compensation, performance, recruiting, etc. (with support from our operations team and backing from the existing ELT), and create strategy and cohesion where needed. Overall, you’ll strategically evaluate what’s working, what’s still needed and build within a larger lens towards our ambitious company-wide shared goals. If you’re a builder by nature, and strategist by experience - this might be the right match!

Responsibilities

• Develop and lead Arbital’s overall People strategy in partnership with the CEO and executive team.
• Build the People function from an early foundation, initially operating as a senior individual contributor with the opportunity to build a team over time.
• Establish a clear, thoughtful roadmap across talent acquisition, onboarding, performance management, compensation, employee engagement, retention, and organizational development.
• Improve hiring quality by creating consistent assessment practices, strengthening interview processes, coaching hiring managers, and ensuring hiring decisions are aligned to business needs.
• Design a scalable, company-wide onboarding experience that helps new hires quickly understand the business, culture, tools, and expectations.
• Partner with leaders across technical, actuarial, commercial, and operational functions to understand their needs and build effective people practices around them.
• Shape and reinforce a high-performance, inclusive culture as the company grows.
• Introduce pragmatic performance-management, talent-review, and succession approaches that support accountability, development, and retention.
• Advise leadership on organizational design, workforce planning, compensation, and difficult employee decisions.
• Diagnose people-related challenges, prioritize effectively, and avoid short-term fixes that create larger issues later.

Qualifications

• Significant senior People leadership experience, including building or substantially improving a People function in an early-stage or high-growth company.
• Experience operating in a startup or scale-up environment, ideally Series B, Series C, or a comparable stage of growth.
• Healthcare experience is essential; experience in value-based care, payer-facing businesses, healthcare data, or adjacent sectors preferred.
• Understanding of the complexity of healthcare organizations, including healthcare terminology, payer dynamics, and specialized technical workforces.
• Demonstrated ability to balance strategic leadership with hands-on execution, particularly as a first or early People hire.
• Strong talent acquisition and talent-assessment capability, including designing hiring rubrics, improving candidate quality, and helping managers make better hiring decisions.
• Experience creating scalable onboarding, performance, compensation, talent-review, and employee-retention programs.
• Exceptional judgment, prioritization skills, adaptability, and comfort working through ambiguity.
• Executive presence and the ability to build trust with, and influence, senior leaders across the business.
• A practical, low-ego approach and the ability to independently diagnose challenges and lead solutions.

Benefits

• Cash compensation expected to fall in the $250,000–$300,000+ range, depending on experience, scope, and market factors.
• Equity component.
• Remote first work.

Company Description

Arbital Health builds the AI-powered infrastructure that helps payers, providers, and value-based care organizations manage, measure and adjudicate risk-based contracts, pairing actuarial-grade rigor with modern software, backed by a dedicated healthcare actuary on every client engagement. Arbital's platform is trusted by organizations including HarmonyCares, SonarMD, and UNC Health.

Founded in late 2023, Arbital is a Series B startup that has seen significant growth in revenue and valuation. The team has grown from roughly 50 people at the start of 2026 to over 75 today, with plans to keep growing toward triple digits next year. Headcount spans product, engineering, actuarial commercial roles, and client delivery.

This is Arbital's first dedicated people leadership role, and will be a very trusted seat on the ELT. Arbital needs someone who can diagnose what's working, name what isn't, and lead change across the business.