About Calo

Calo is a meal subscription startup on a mission to make healthy eating easy. Over the past six years, we've delivered tens of millions of meals to hundreds of thousands of customers across seven countries, and we still feel like day one. Now, we're embarking on an AI-powered transformation to change how the world eats and make healthy meals better, faster, and more affordable.

Calo in numbers and facts

• Operating internationally in 7 countries (Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, the UK)
• 1,600+ full-time people across all geographies
• 80+ Million Dollars in funding till date, on the road to an IPO within the next two years (Latest news here)
• One of the fastest-growing food-tech startups globally today, but that’s not important, what’s important is serving the customers better while scaling a winning company culture
• Employee Net Promoter score at 40+ (What’s eNPS?)

The People & Culture team 💚

• 32 members across all our geographies
• The team has the following functions
  • Talent Acquisition → Looks after all our recruitment across all geographies and supports our business units
  • People Partners → Looks after our dedicated departments performance and growth
  • People Operations & HR → The central team that acts as the customer service team for HQ + the center of excellence and support function for the local business units
  • Employee Experience → Looks after the employee day to day experience and our working environments
  • Content creation & employer branding → Looks after building an authentic employer brand across LinkedIn & Socials (Check out life@calo)
  • IT & Automation → Looks after the quality of our tools & finding ways to help departments automate their day to day workflows
• We really don’t like traditional HR methods, our goal as a department is simple = Build a 10/5 star experience for our employees (What’s a 10/5 experience?)
• We don’t operate as a back-office function that focuses on admin only. We refuse to be your traditional HR department. We believe in adding strategic business value by being involved across different parts of the business and helping with hands-on support. You will find us doing things like:
  • Helping the business in setting AI adoption strategy across all functions
  • Having in depth conversations with department heads about their org design, challenging inefficiencies, and designing better performance systems with them
  • Pushing for good judgment and refusing “policy over people” type of thinking across the organization
  • Debating KPIs and pushing for fair performance expectations across the organization
  • Hacking our way with AI and tools for stronger efficiencies for the team and better experiences for our people

Role Details

Why this role?

Calo has grown exponentially over the past 5 years, and we’re now gearing up for an IPO within the next two years. That means building stronger systems for scale, and foundations for growth as we continue delivering a world-class employee experience.

Today, our biggest opportunity for success is up-skilling and building our people operations function and team members to be the main drivers of change of P&C initiatives in the company.

We’re looking for a passionate leader, who disagrees with the conventional HR norms and is interested in building and inspiring that 10/5 star experience with us.

This role is based in the GCC, with frequent travel needed to ensure you stay close to your local teams.

Scope of role

1- People Ops from A-Z

You’ll be responsible for up-leveling our People Ops’s ways of work and up-skilling our existing people operations team members on how to be effective department/country partners.

As the leader of the People Ops function, you’ll be looking after the largest vertical of the P&C department that includes 15 employees across different countries. Today the team is made of fantastic human beings who are passionate about their work and excel in different ways.

You will have to champion the empathy-first approach our team must have with our employees and build a team culture around that.

2- Building a center of excellence

You’ll be responsible for building a center of excellence and a support function for all our business units and looking after everything from benefits management to compliance and governance systems.

Your role is to elevate the team’s strategic thinking through stronger KPIs setting and monitoring processes and help build a continuous improvement mentality in all areas of People Ops.

This includes owning our HRM systems and ensuring our compliance is exceptional across the board in all the countries we operate in.

3- Local country strategy and governance

Every country and business unit will look slightly different and have different needs. You’ll be responsible for helping the local teams set those strategies and agendas and support them in executing them.

You will also be the go-to person to consult on how our people's experience should be localized and distinguished while maintaining the authentic Calo culture feel.

Are you a good fit?

From an experience point of view

1. You’re very strong with systems and mechanisms such as auditing and compliance, and you understand how to lead the team around those areas through a positive culture, not through a fear driven one
2. You’ve had experience leading regional teams in the GCC, and have strong knowledge and background on the labour laws of the countries we operate in + a strong understanding of how to lead in new markets if needed
3. You’ve had great experience partnering with other departments such as legal and finance (With the occasional disagreements of course..)
4. You have strong experience owning an HRM from A-Z
5. You have strong experience in building/enhancing SOPs and ensuring they’re followed properly on the ground

From who you are as a person

1. You’re humble, you listen first, you understand, you don’t walk in the room with a “This is how it should be done” mentality
2. You care about the best idea winning, not who’s saying the idea and how senior they are
3. You’re extremely organized, you know how to build a well-oiled machine that runs on order and discipline
4. You’re also fun, you’re fun to be around, enjoyable to work with, and care about your people and protective of their well-being
5. As you’ve navigated your HR journey and in your past, you might have felt like you had to debate one too many times with company policies that just don’t make sense, and you’ve always chosen the uncomfortable path
6. You’re curious, you’re now fascinated with how AI can potentially transform our world of People Ops and all the potential it can do