People Operations / HR Director

People Operations / HR Director

Kraków, Poland

People Operations Lead, Poland

About Tripadvisor

The Tripadvisor Group connects people to experiences worth sharing, and aims to be the world’s most trusted source for travel and experiences. We leverage our brands, technology, and capabilities to connect our global audience with partners through rich content, travel guidance, and two-sided marketplaces for experiences, accommodations, restaurants, and other travel categories. The subsidiaries of Tripadvisor, Inc. (Nasdaq: TRIP), include a portfolio of travel brands and businesses, including Tripadvisor, Viator, and TheFork.

Role Purpose

At Tripadvisor Group, our People Operations team is focused on building a transparent, collaborative, and high-performing employee experience. This role will translate global business priorities into practical, localized people processes and  strategies that support our growing Kraków hub and broader technical organization.

This role is both strategic and hands-on. The successful candidate will serve as Tripadvisor’s senior local People Operations leader in Poland, acting as a trusted advisor to local business leaders, global People teams, and cross-functional partners while ensuring operational excellence and compliance with Polish employment law.

Role Overview

Tripadvisor is establishing Poland as a key hub for our global engineering and technical teams. We are seeking a pragmatic, highly autonomous HR leader who can build, execute, and scale people practices in a fast-moving environment.

This is a broad, generalist role with significant individual contributor responsibility. This role will own local HR operations, employee relations, compliance, workforce enablement, and site culture initiatives, while partnering equally closely with global Centers of Excellence (including Talent Acquisition, Total Rewards, Legal, Payroll, and People Systems) and local senior leadership onsite to ensure Group consistency.

The ideal candidate is low-ego, execution-oriented, and comfortable moving between strategic advisory work and hands-on operational problem solving. They will bring deep Polish HR expertise, strong stakeholder judgment, and the ability to operate effectively with remote leadership and minimal day-to-day oversight. Most importantly, the ideal candidate will be equally adept at partnering with both local leadership and global HR Centers of Excellence.

Job Location: Hybrid

This role is a hybrid position that requires 1-2 days per week in our Krakow office

What You’ll Do

Key Responsibilities

Local HR Leadership & Strategic Partnering

• Serve as the senior People Operations partner for Tripadvisor’s Poland-based employees and leaders, with a particular focus on the Kraków technology hub.
• Act as a trusted advisor to local business leaders and global People Operations teams, balancing business priorities with enterprise-wide people strategy.
• Provide guidance on organizational design, workforce planning, team effectiveness, employee engagement, performance management, and talent development.
• Partner with leaders to identify and address people-related risks, including employee burnout, retention challenges, manager capability gaps, and organizational change impacts.
• Support the continued maturation of the Kraków site by strengthening local culture, operating practices, and employee experience.

Polish Employment Law, Compliance & Risk Management

• Serve as Tripadvisor’s primary subject matter expert on Polish employment law and HR compliance, in partnership with legal counsel.
• Advise managers, People Operations, Legal, Finance, and G&A stakeholders on local employment matters before decisions are made, including terminations, notice periods, disciplinary processes, non-competes, working time, leaves of absence, and employment documentation.
• Ensure local HR processes are compliant with the Polish Labour Code, ZUS requirements, and applicable employment regulations.
• Partner with Legal and external advisors to monitor legislative changes and brief global People stakeholders on relevant updates before they take effect.
• Proactively audit local policies, documentation, and practices to maintain readiness for Labour Inspectorate inspections and other compliance reviews.
• Localize global HR policies and programs to ensure they are practical, compliant, and culturally appropriate for Poland.

People Operations Execution

• Own day-to-day People Operations delivery for Poland, serving as the accessible local HR point of contact for employees and managers.
• Resolve employee and manager questions directly and efficiently, reducing unnecessary escalation through global or vendor channels, while also encouraging and influencing the use of the employee portal for self-service answers.
• Handle sensitive employee relations matters with discretion, sound judgment, cultural awareness, and in-person trust where needed.
• Execute and continuously improve employee lifecycle processes, including onboarding, offboarding, contract administration, benefits enrollment, employee documentation, and employment certificates.
• Manage offer logistics and pre-employment documentation for Poland-based candidates in partnership with Talent Acquisition.
• Identify opportunities to simplify, automate, and scale local HR workflows while maintaining a strong employee experience.

Payroll, Benefits & Vendor Coordination

• Provide any needed data to centralized Payroll team.
• Support centralized HR COEs in compliance requirements related to payroll, ZUS, benefits, and employee records, working hands-on where needed until scalable processes are fully established.
• Partner with Total Rewards and Finance on salary reviews, compensation frameworks, local benefits, and market benchmarking for Kraków and other Poland-based roles as needed.

Talent, Performance & Workforce Enablement

• Support managers through performance management, talent review, employee development, internal mobility, and progression processes.
• Help managers navigate employee performance in a way that is both legally compliant and aligned with Tripadvisor’s values.
• Roll out global People programs locally, including performance reviews, engagement surveys, learning initiatives, manager enablement, and cultural transformation efforts.
• Adapt global program timing, messaging, and delivery where required by Polish law, market expectations, or local business context.

HR Data, Systems & Analytics

• Use Workday and other People systems to execute local HR workflows accurately and efficiently.
• Using Visier, leverage HR data and analytics to provide insights on headcount, turnover, engagement, retention, organizational health, and workforce trends.
• Use GenAI, to improve productivity, decision quality, and operational efficiency while understanding their limitations and risks.

Operating Principles

The successful candidate will embody Tripadvisor’s execution-oriented culture and demonstrate the following behaviors:

Execution Is Our Edge

• Take ownership from strategy through execution, ensuring work is completed with urgency, accuracy, and accountability.
• Prioritize practical action over excessive analysis, while applying sound judgment to risk, compliance, and stakeholder impact.
• Finish what can be completed today and maintain momentum on complex cross-functional work.

No Problem Is Someone Else’s Problem

• Own People Operations processes end to end, even when work crosses teams, functions, or geographies.
• Navigate ambiguity, remove blockers, and know when to push with diplomacy versus when to build consensus.
• Act as a reliable partner to senior stakeholders in Kraków and across the global organization.

Low-Ego, High-Trust Leadership

• Build trust through transparency, consistency, discretion, and follow-through.
• Operate with humility and pragmatism, whether advising senior leaders or solving day-to-day administrative issues.
• Work collaboratively across cultures, time zones, and functions while maintaining strong local accountability.

AI-Forward, Judgment-Led

• Use modern tools, including GenAI, to increase productivity, improve workflows, and enhance problem solving.
• Apply clear judgment around data privacy, legal sensitivity, employee confidentiality, and the limits of automation.

Skills & Experience

• 8+ years of progressive HR experience, including at least 3 years in a senior HR Business Partner, People Operations, or HR leadership role.
• Deep, practical knowledge of Polish employment law, HR compliance, and local labor practices.
• Experience supporting technology, engineering, e-commerce, travel, or other high-growth global organizations strongly preferred.
• Proven track record of equally partnering with local leadership and centralized HR teams, many of which are not based in Poland
• Demonstrated ability to operate independently with remote leadership and limited day-to-day supervision.
• Strong generalist HR capability across employee relations, compliance, performance management, compensation partnership, employee lifecycle operations, and organizational design.
• Proven ability to advise senior leaders while also executing hands-on operational work.
• Full professional fluency in Polish and English.
• Strong stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence across local and global teams.
• Practical experience using Workday for HR workflows, reporting, and employee data management.
• Strong judgment, discretion, and professionalism in handling sensitive employee matters.
• Comfort operating in a hybrid, global-first environment with evolving processes and priorities.

Why Join Us

This is a rare opportunity to shape the future of Tripadvisor’s presence in Poland and help build a critical hub for our global technical organization.

This role will have a broad and meaningful scope, influence global People strategy, and build scalable practices that support both local employees and the wider business. This role is ideal for a senior HR leader who wants to combine strategic influence with hands-on impact in a growing, globally connected environment.

What We Offer

• Competitive compensation packages (routinely benchmarked against the latest industry data), including base salary and annual bonuses
• “Work your way” with flexibility to suit your lifestyle. Tripadvisor Group takes a remote-friendly approach to collaboration across a worldwide team, with the option to join on-site as often as you’d like or as required by your team.
• Flexible schedule. Work-life balance is ingrained in our culture by design. Trust and accountability make it work.
• Donation matching. Give back? Give more! We match qualifying charitable donations annually.
• Tuition assistance. Want to level up your career? We love to hear it! Receive annual support for qualified programs.
• Lifestyle benefit. An annual benefit to spend on yourself. Use it on travel, wellness, or whatever suits you.
• Travel perks. We believe that travel is employee development, so we provide discounts and more.
• Employee assistance program. We’re here for you with resources and programs to help you through life’s challenges.
• Health benefits. We offer great coverage and competitive premiums.
• Generous referral scheme. Help us grow and be rewarded with generous awards for referring successful candidates.

Our Cultural Pillars:

Traveler first

We exist to create value for our customer, the traveler. We enable our suppliers and partners to unlock this value. Their collective behaviors and insights are what drives us.

Execution is our edge

We act fast, experiment, learn from failure, iterate, and improve the solutions of tomorrow across every aspect of our business. Our execution is agile, data-driven, prioritised, and built to scale. We assume no problem is someone else’s problem and finish what can be done today, knowing tomorrow will bring fresh challenges.

We succeed together

The best outcomes are driven by empathic, humble, and diverse subject matter experts working toward shared goals. We collaborate relentlessly, challenge assumptions, give actionable feedback, and set each other up for success through empowered teams with a clear charter. We transparently take ownership of our growth, individually and as a team. We celebrate the quality of our effort, our learnings, and our collective achievements.

We strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all candidates. If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please make sure to reach out to your individual recruiter or our team at AccessibleRecruiting@tripadvisor.com.

If you have any additional questions about careers at Tripadvisor you can email us at recruitment@tripadvisor.com. We have all the answers!

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