Head of HR | Physical AI | Limassol, Cyprus
Package: Competitive salary, plus discretionary performance bonus, ESOP and benefits
Location: Limassol, Cyprus, with regular travel to Munich, Germany
Relocation: This search is focused on HR leaders currently based in the UK, Ireland and continental Europe. Visa sponsorship and relocation support are available for the move to Cyprus.
About our client
Our client is building a global leader in physical AI, anchored in Europe’s strongest robotics heritage. Founded by entrepreneurs with backgrounds in scaling digital products and advanced robotics, the team is bolstered by senior leadership from top-tier AI research labs and industrial tech companies.
Driven by a mission to create versatile and trustworthy embodied AI for physical labour, they fuse deep engineering mastery in AI and mechatronics with a rapid-execution culture. They are addressing the labour shortage by closing the gap to production-grade deployment. This means building the trusted alternative: robots that are safe, secure, and engineered to automotive standards of scale and durability.
Well capitalised and operating in semi-stealth, they are now assembling their core team, and hiring to the standard of the world’s leading technology organisations.
Your mission
Talent Acquisition
- Own end-to-end recruiting across all functions and seniority levels, with a focus on technical and specialist roles
- Design and implement a scalable, structured hiring process from intake to offer, including interview frameworks, scorecards and hiring manager enablement
- Set up and manage Personio as the central ATS and recruiting hub
- Source and manage relationships with external recruiters and headhunters
- Drive recruiting strategy in a stealth-mode environment, managing candidate experience and confidentiality across the pipeline
People and Culture
- Build and own the full employee lifecycle: onboarding, performance, development, offboarding
- Establish and maintain HR operations across both Germany and Cyprus, ensuring compliance with local labour law in each entity
- Own and develop Personio as the HRIS, ensuring data accuracy and process consistency across both locations
- Define and implement HR policies, handbooks and documentation standards
- Partner with payroll providers in Germany and Cyprus, ensuring smooth monthly operations and compliance
- Lead GDPR compliance for all HR and candidate data, including assessment of tooling and data storage practices
- Support visa and relocation processes for international hires
- Define and maintain salary bands and compensation benchmarks in close alignment with management, ensuring compliance with the EU Pay Transparency Directive
Leadership and Stakeholder Management
- Act as the primary HR partner to the founders and key stakeholders, including function leads in Munich and Cyprus
- Build and manage a small HR team as the company scales
- Define and own the HR roadmap, KPIs and reporting cadence for leadership visibility
- Lead internal communication on people topics, including team announcements, policy rollouts and culture initiatives
Your profile
Must-haves
- Top-tier technology pedigree: HR experience gained at a globally recognised technology leader, or at an internationally funded, top-tier AI, deep-tech or hardware company known for hiring world-class engineering talent
- 6+ years of experience in HR, with a mix of generalist People Operations and Talent Acquisition
- Proven experience building HR from scratch, ideally at a pre-seed, pre-product or early-stage company. This means creating the function yourself, not scaling or optimising an existing one, with concrete, named examples
- Hands-on experience with Personio or a comparable HRIS/ATS
- Comfortable being both strategic and deeply operational: this is not a team-of-many role yet
- Familiarity with GDPR compliance processes in an HR context
- Able to travel regularly and frequently between Cyprus and Germany
- Fluent in English, written and spoken
This role is not the right fit if your HR career has been built mainly in FX/CFD, iGaming or payments, in small to mid-sized SaaS or software businesses, or in organisations outside the top tier of international technology.
Nice-to-haves
- Experience working with international or EoR employment set-ups
- Background in robotics, deep tech or hardware-adjacent companies
- Experience managing payroll operations across multiple entities
Mindset
You are comfortable with ambiguity and motivated by building. You think in systems but move fast. You earn trust with founders and candidates alike. You do not wait for processes to exist: you create them.
Why join
- The team: work directly alongside founders with a proven track record of building unicorn-scale companies and defining global robotics standards
- Smart strategy: they operate as disciplined fast followers. Capital is timed to the deployment inflection point, avoiding early-mover dead ends to scale fast on proven foundations
- Resources: substantially internally funded and attracting top-tier investors, to avoid any capital constraints on the mission
- Historic opportunity: join at the dawn of a new industry comparable to the rise of the automobile, and help shape the European champion in this trillion-dollar market
Locations: two main locations, Munich, Germany and Limassol, Cyprus. This pan-European set-up represents the core ambition of building a European technology leader, with a great talent base and a strong corporate structure.
Recruiter: Donna Stephenson, Emerald Zebra, a specialist recruitment and executive search consultancy for FinTech, Tech, Financial Services and iGaming.
Our client is an equal opportunity employer. They celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all builders.