People Operations Manager

About Tutor

We believe robots are the biggest lever we have to making the physical world a better, more affordable place. But robots are a rounding error in our society: nearly nine out of ten American factories and warehouses don’t even have a single robot, and robots have yet to make their way into our homes or places of business.

Tutor Intelligence is changing that.

Tutor is a robotics research and deployment company, building generally capable robot hardware and artificial intelligence to enable robots to go where no robots have gone before. Sonny is a semi-humanoid robot with frontier dexterity approaching the human form. Cassie does back-breaking work, moving boxes, pallets, and bulk goods for businesses from family-owned manufacturers to some of the largest brands in the world. Tutor robots are manufactured at scale and operate as a network, combining the whole fleet’s learned experience to train ever more capable robot artificial intelligence.

Founded at MIT and headquartered in Watertown, MA, our team is full stack: we design and manufacture robot hardware, train our own models, work directly with the smallest and largest end-customers, and maintain our fleet across the United States. We’re a team of researchers, engineers, technicians, operators, and sellers who love building things and solving hard problems.

Our mission is grand: robots everywhere, for the common good, raising the standard of living across North America, and then the world.

Why Tutor?

Whether you’re designing robots, closing deals, running deployments, or creating the processes that help us scale, your work doesn’t sit on a shelf. It shows up on real production floors, making physical work safer and more affordable.

Our team of 160+ is driven by curiosity and a genuine love of building. Everyone here takes real ownership, learns fast, and holds a high bar while having each other’s backs. If you love hard problems and creating things that didn’t exist before, you’ll fit right in.

Your Responsibilities

The People Operations Manager owns the day-to-day employee experience at Tutor, from the moment someone signs an offer to the day they leave. You’ll run onboarding, 30-60-90 check-ins, employee changes, and offboarding for a 160+ person team spread across six states, and you’ll be the person employees and managers come to when they have a question about how things work here.

If you’ve spent your career at a company where People Ops means processing tickets in a system someone else designed, this is different. We’ve spent the past year building the foundations: onboarding, leveling, values, compensation. What we don’t have yet is someone to run them well, notice where they’re breaking, and make them better. You’ll inherit lean systems and real ownership of them. When onboarding isn’t landing, you fix it. When a manager doesn’t know how to handle a team change, you figure out the answer and then write it down so the next manager doesn’t have to ask.

We’re looking for someone who is organized to the point of being slightly annoying about it, who treats a new hire’s first week as something worth getting right, and who is just as comfortable walking a factory floor in Watertown as they are in a spreadsheet. You care about people as people, not as headcount, and you have the judgment to handle sensitive situations with discretion. You don’t need a decade of HR experience. You need to be the kind of person who sees a gap and closes it.

This role reports to our People Operations Lead and works closely with Recruiting on the handoff into onboarding and with the People Strategy team on comp, promotion, and title changes that come out of the performance cycle.

What you’ll own

• Onboarding end to end: pre-start logistics, first-week experience, partnership with hiring managers, and the buddy program

• 30-, 60-, and 90-day check-ins with new hires and their managers, and acting on what you hear

• Employee changes: transfers, manager changes, title and comp updates, and keeping our HRIS and directory accurate

• Offboarding, exit interviews, and stay interviews, and turning what you learn into changes we actually make

• Being the first point of contact for employee and manager questions on policies, process, and "how do I…"

• Maintaining and improving the People Ops playbooks so the team can run without heroics

• Partnering with our Compliance & Benefits Administrator on leave, accommodations, and benefits questions that come up through the lifecycle

Who You Are

• 3+ years in People Operations, HR generalist, or a similar operations role at a fast-growing company

• You’ve run onboarding and offboarding yourself, not just supported someone who did

• Comfortable working in an HRIS and keeping employee data accurate across systems (we use Rippling)

• Strong written communication. Much of this job is explaining things clearly to people who are busy

• High discretion and sound judgment with confidential information and sensitive employee situations

• Not afraid to step foot in a factory or a warehouse. Our team includes technicians, assemblers, and field staff, and their experience matters as much as anyone’s

• Based in or willing to relocate to the Boston area; this role is in-office in Watertown, MA

Nice to haves

• Experience at a company that scaled from ~100 to 300+ people

• Experience supporting hourly and salaried populations, or multi-state employees

• You’ve built or rebuilt an onboarding program and can talk about what you changed and why

• Familiarity with leave and accommodations processes, even if you weren’t the owner