Senior Manager, People Operations

Our Story and Purpose Linden Lab develops platforms that empower people to create, connect, and thrive through transformative virtual experiences. Since 1999, we’ve been at the forefront of the creator economy, building durable spaces for limitless imagination, self-expression, and human connection. In 2003, we launched Second Life, a vibrant, user-driven virtual world that has grown into a global community with over two billion user creations and a flourishing $650 million economy. People build relationships, express themselves, create together, and, for those who choose, build real livelihoods through their creativity. Unlike traditional social media, Second Life fosters sustained connection between strangers and offers mobility, agency, belonging, collaboration, and shared purpose to people whose real-world circumstances may limit their options. For many, it is not just a platform, but a place to participate fully and authentically. At Linden Lab, the same principles that shape our communities guide how we work together. We value diverse perspectives, strengths-based leadership, and the belief that we do our best work together. You’ll join a thoughtful, mission-driven team where you can grow, contribute meaningfully, and help shape technology with real social impact. We invite you to come as you are. Work Location This role requires working onsite in our San Francisco office for full workdays Monday through Thursday. Employees have the flexibility to work remotely or from the office on Fridays as part of their regular five day workweek. Your Mission We’re looking for a Senior Manager, People Operations to take ownership of the day-to-day work that powers the employee experience and keep raising the bar for how we deliver it. Reporting to our Director, People & Culture, you’ll lead the operational work while helping us continually improve how it gets done. We believe the best People teams create leverage. Our impact isn’t measured by how much work flows through our team, but by how much easier we make it for the organization to operate effectively. We remove friction, create clarity, and build systems that help people move faster, make better decisions, and focus on high value work. You won’t be joining a team that needs convincing to challenge an existing process or try a new approach. We want you to question what exists, improve it, and bring us the ideas we haven’t thought of yet. How You’ll Grow With Us You’ll sharpen your judgment and expand how you think about People Operations work by partnering with a team that challenges the status quo, asks why, and expects you to bring your own point of view. You’ll learn to move quickly without sacrificing thoughtfulness, question established approaches, and turn better ideas into better ways of working. From the start, you’ll gain exposure to the thinking behind organizational priorities and People decisions, working closely with senior People leaders and participating in strategy conversations. You’ll build experience navigating the harder parts of the work, where there isn’t always an obvious answer and judgment, empathy, business context, and employee experience all have to be weighed together. You’ll also deepen your capabilities in AI, automation, workflow design, systems, and integrations, with the support and room to experiment, test new approaches, and turn your ideas into improvements you can actually see. The Impact You’ll Drive
- Run the day-to-day People Operations function, owning operational execution and ensuring the work is accurate, timely, compliant, and delivers a consistently high-quality employee experience.
- Lead payroll administration and the execution of approved compensation changes across our multi-state workforce, maintaining strong controls and resolving issues quickly and accurately.
- Oversee and execute benefits, retirement plan, employee leave, and workers’ compensation administration, balancing technical precision and compliance with an experience that makes complex programs easier for employees to navigate.
- Lead the employee lifecycle from pre-onboarding through offboarding, bringing together systems, logistics, communications, manager readiness, employee changes, and key milestones to create a seamless, high-quality experience.
- Drive continuous improvement across the function, using systems thinking, data, and feedback to identify root causes, simplify complexity, strengthen self-service, and design out recurring problems.
- Design and build automated workflows that eliminate unnecessary manual work, improve handoffs, prevent errors, and create leverage across the People function, turning opportunities for automation into working solutions.
- Optimize our People systems, including Paylocity, maintaining exceptional data integrity and finding better ways for our technology, data, and workflows to work together.
- Develop and analyze People metrics, dashboards, and reporting to surface workforce tre