Senior Manager, HR, People & Culture

About Big Viking Games

Big Viking Games is a Canadian gaming company focused on building, operating, and growing long-standing online game communities. Our games have entertained players for years, supported by loyal audiences, live operations, evolving content systems, product innovation, and deep player-driven economies.

Our flagship titles, YoWorld and FishWorld, have served millions of players over their lifetime. These are enduring live-service virtual worlds with rich in-game economies, virtual goods, social interaction, and long-term player engagement at their core.

We are entering a new phase of modernization and growth, with a focus on stronger operating discipline, better systems, clearer accountability, practical AI adoption, and scalable processes that help our teams perform at a higher level.

The People function is central to that work.

The Opportunity

Big Viking Games is hiring a Senior Manager, People & Culture to build our People function from the ground up.

This is the person who will own People and Culture end to end: the frameworks, systems, manager capability, employee lifecycle, and day-to-day HR operations that help the company run well, treat people fairly, and scale.

This is a genuine greenfield build. You will design and roll out the core People infrastructure, including the employee handbook, HR policies, performance framework, career paths, job architecture, compensation processes, manager training, HR systems, and the operating rhythms behind them.

You will do this with executive backing, direct access to leadership, and the room to build it properly.

Reporting to the COO, you will be the senior People voice in the business. You will partner with leaders and managers to bring structure, consistency, fairness, and evidence-based decision-making into how we hire, onboard, manage, develop, reward, and retain people.

This role is not about doing managers’ jobs for them. HR builds the system, equips managers, coaches them, and supports the organization in living up to it. Managers remain accountable for managing their teams. Your job is to make them better at it.

The right person is people-first, systems-minded, practical, technically comfortable, and curious about how AI and automation can help a lean People function operate with more speed, consistency, and clarity.

What You’ll Own

HR Foundations and People Frameworks

• Design and roll out the core People infrastructure, including the employee handbook, HR policies, performance-management framework, career and competency frameworks, and job architecture.
• Stand up a performance system with clear manager scorecards, calibrated ratings, and consistent standards so raises, promotions, recognition, and performance decisions are transparent and grounded in evidence.
• Build succession planning and a documented one-on-one and check-in rhythm across the organization.
• Own the full employee lifecycle, including recruiting support, onboarding, probation, role changes, performance cycles, compensation reviews, leaves, accommodations, and offboarding.
• Create clear templates, workflows, playbooks, and documentation that help managers and employees understand how things work.
• Improve consistency across teams without adding unnecessary bureaucracy.

Manager Enablement and Leadership Development

• Build the manager operating system: training, coaching, tools, templates, and rhythms that help managers become stronger leaders.
• Bring clarity to roles, responsibilities, ownership, and decision-making across the management layer.
• Coach managers and leaders through difficult people situations, performance conversations, employee relations issues, and organizational change.
• Support managers in applying People frameworks consistently, fairly, and with good judgment.
• Partner with leadership to keep the performance bar high and applied fairly.
• Build practical routines for one-on-ones, check-ins, goal setting, feedback, documentation, recognition, and follow-through.
• Help create a culture where feedback is direct, timely, respectful, and useful.

Talent Acquisition and Employer Brand

• Own full-cycle recruitment where needed, including role definition, sourcing, screening, interview coordination, offers, and onboarding.
• Build the systems that help every department hire well, not just the searches HR runs directly.
• Train hiring managers on structured interviewing, role calibration, candidate evaluation, scorecards, and debriefs.
• Help create a professional candidate experience that reflects the company we are building.
• Strengthen our employer brand through job postings, candidate communications, leadership visibility, careers-page content, employee stories, and consistent role narratives.
• Support proactive pipeline development in a tight talent market.
• Operate the ATS and sourcing tools with discipline, including role workflows, candidate status tracking, interview stages, and hiring documentation.

Total Rewards and Compensation

• Build market-benchmarked salary bands and a clear compensation philosophy.
• Help define where we choose to lead the market, where we match the market, and how we make those tradeoffs.
• Bring transparency and consistency to compensation, promotions, leveling, and pay decisions.
• Support pay-equity compliance and compensation review processes.
• Partner with Finance on payroll inputs, compensation data, bonus administration, benefits, RRSP, and total rewards reporting.
• Use HRIS data to help leadership make better compensation and workforce decisions.

Employee Relations, Culture, and Engagement

• Handle employee relations end to end, including grievances, conflict, harassment complaints, investigations, performance concerns, accommodations, and sensitive employee matters.
• Apply a consistent, well-documented standard rooted in fairness, respect, and evidence.
• Provide a safe, credible channel for employees and managers to raise concerns.
• Own engagement and retention programs, including eNPS or engagement surveys, action planning, recognition, and follow-up.
• Help strengthen connection, belonging, accountability, and trust across the company.
• Navigate sensitive, high-stakes people topics with evenhanded judgment, clear communication, and consistently applied principles.

People Operations, HRIS, and Compliance

• Make Humi the single source of truth for employee, compensation, performance, leave, benefits, and organizational data.
• Keep employee records, HRIS workflows, reporting fields, and the interactive org chart accurate and current.
• Own HR operations and records, including onboarding and offboarding administration, employee documentation, leaves, accommodations, time off, and policy records.
• Maintain HR compliance with Ontario employment standards and other Canadian jurisdictions where we employ people.
• Support compliance areas such as job-posting rules, electronic-monitoring policies, disconnecting-from-work policies, AODA, pay equity, employment records, workplace violence and harassment, and health and safety obligations.
• Own workplace health, safety, and wellbeing obligations, including the workplace violence and harassment program and psychosocial or mental-health considerations.
• Manage offboarding and terminations professionally, compassionately, and with appropriate documentation.

Organizational Design, Workforce Planning, and Change

• Partner with the COO and leadership on workforce planning, headcount planning, org design, spans and layers, and contractor-versus-employee mix.
• Support people-side change management during growth, restructuring, role changes, operating model changes, and new ways of working.
• Help leadership understand organizational risk, talent gaps, succession needs, and team-health issues.
• Build a well-documented People foundation, including policies, SOPs, records, org data, workflows, and manager tools that scale cleanly as the company grows.

People Analytics, AI, and Automation

• Build and own a monthly People dashboard for the COO and senior leadership.
• Track the metrics leadership needs, including headcount, hiring, time to fill, attrition, retention, engagement, performance cycle completion, compensation movement, manager readiness, and people-risk indicators.
• Use AI and automation thoughtfully to reduce manual HR work, improve documentation, summarize information, support reporting, and make People workflows faster and more consistent.
• Operate confidently across HR systems, ATS platforms, spreadsheets, dashboards, collaboration tools, documentation systems, and everyday workplace software.
• Identify opportunities to automate repetitive workflows without losing human judgment, employee trust, or privacy discipline.

Requirements

What You Bring

• 5 to 7+ years of experience in HR, People Operations, People & Culture, HR business partnership, or a related role.
• Senior or leadership-level ownership of the People function, or significant ownership of major People programs.
• Demonstrated experience building People infrastructure from scratch or materially rebuilding immature People systems.
• Strong experience across the full HR remit: recruiting, onboarding, performance management, employee relations, total rewards, engagement, compensation, compliance, and workforce planning.
• A track record of coaching and upskilling managers. You make managers better rather than doing their jobs for them.
• Evidence-based judgment. You make people decisions defensible with data, documentation, fairness, transparency, and consistency.
• Strong knowledge of Canadian and Ontario employment law, with a practical command of HR compliance obligations.
• Strong judgment with sensitive situations, confidential information, employee relations matters, and difficult conversations.
• Technical comfort across HRIS, ATS, Google Workspace, Slack, spreadsheets, dashboards, and modern workplace tools.
• Genuine curiosity about AI and automation, with a practical view of how they can improve People work.
• Strong written communication skills and the ability to create clear policies, manager guides, templates, playbooks, and employee communications.
• Discretion, follow-through, calm under pressure, and a bias toward action in ambiguity.
• Ability to work from our Toronto office 4 days per week.

Highly Desirable

• Experience in gaming, live-service products, SaaS, technology, digital products, or other always-on business models.
• CHRP, CHRL, or equivalent HR certification.
• Experience with Humi or similar HRIS platforms.
• Experience with applicant tracking systems and LinkedIn Recruiter.
• Experience building People dashboards, compensation bands, pay-transparency frameworks, and people analytics.
• Experience building performance management systems, career frameworks, competency models, job architecture, or compensation review processes.
• Experience creating employee handbooks, policy frameworks, manager training, HR playbooks, and employee lifecycle workflows.
• Experience supporting a company through significant growth, restructuring, investment, operating model change, or cultural reset.
• Experience working directly with a COO, CEO, founder, or senior leadership team.

Who You Are

• You are people-first. You genuinely care about employees and managers, and you build systems that help them succeed.
• You are a builder by instinct. You see gaps, create structure, and move work forward without waiting to be asked.
• You are a multiplier. You make managers more effective and build capability that outlasts any one project.
• You are fair and evidence-driven. You believe people decisions should be defensible, transparent, and grounded in consistent principles.
• You are naturally curious, especially about how AI, automation, data, and better systems can make People work faster, clearer, and more useful.
• You are calm under pressure, trusted with sensitive information, practical, and low ego. You can write a policy, coach a manager, clean up an HRIS workflow, and handle a sensitive employee issue in the same week.

Benefits

Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits package, including health, dental, and vision coverage.
• HSA/WSA spending account from day one.
• Participation in the Employee Stock Option Plan.
• RRSP participation and matching.
• 15 vacation days.
• 10 wellness days.
• Opportunity to build the People function of a live-service gaming company.
• High-impact partnership with the COO, leadership team, managers, and employees.

Why Big Viking Games

This is a rare chance to build a People function end to end and own how a whole company grows, hires, manages, rewards, and treats its people.

You will have real ownership over the frameworks, systems, manager capability, and operating rhythms that define a healthy organization. You will work directly with the COO and senior leadership, with the visibility, accountability, and growth that come with it.

This role is best suited for someone who wants to build, not just maintain.

Compensation

The expected base salary range for this role is CAD $120,000 to $140,000, depending on experience, People leadership depth, systems-building capability, HR operations experience, and overall fit.

This role is also eligible for bonus and participation in the Employee Stock Option Plan.

Ontario Job Posting and Hiring Process Disclosures

This posting is for an existing vacancy.

Big Viking Games may use AI-assisted tools at some steps of the recruiting process, including application review support, candidate research, interview preparation, scheduling support, and workflow administration.

AI does not make final hiring decisions. Hiring decisions are made by people.

Every interviewed candidate will be informed of their status within 45 days of their final interview.

Accessibility and Accommodation

Big Viking Games is committed to creating an inclusive and accessible environment for all candidates. We welcome applications from individuals of all abilities and will provide accommodations throughout the hiring process as needed.

If you require accommodation during the hiring process, please contact hr@bigvikinggames.com so we can work with you to support your needs.