About the role
About Us
Socket helps devs and security teams ship faster by cutting out security busywork. Thousands of orgs use Socket to safely find, audit, and manage open source code. Our customers - from Anthropic to xAI, and Figma to Vercel - love Socket (just check out their tweets to see for yourself!)
Founded by Feross Aboukhadijeh, a long-time open source maintainer with software downloaded over a billion times a month, Socket has raised $125M in funding from top angels, operators, and security leaders.
About the Role
We’re hiring Socket’s first People Partner dedicated to our Technology teams! We’re scaling quickly: People are taking on new mandates, scope is expanding, and managers are facing new territory. We need someone who can influence without hiding behind policy, support managers without taking over, and introduce structure only when it makes the company faster and more effective.
The work moves between long-range organization questions and immediate human ones. In the same week, you might help a leader evolve how their team operates, coach a new manager through an important conversation, or improve how we run performance reviews, compensation, or onboarding. In each case, you’ll spot patterns, clarify tradeoffs, and turn discussion into decisions and follow-through. Because this is the first dedicated People Partner at Socket, you’ll have room to shape how People partnership works here.
What You’ll Do
- Partner directly with Technology leaders on team design, structure, capacity, headcount, and the talent decisions behind our priorities.
- Help leaders make clearer, more consistent calls on roles, levels, compensation, succession, and internal movement.
- Coach managers to set expectations, give useful feedback, address performance, navigate conflict, and lead effectively as their scope grows.
- Own employee relation issues from first signal through resolution, bringing the right balance of care, rigor, documentation, and pace.
- Lead talent and performance cycles that produce decisions and action, not just meetings, ratings, or completed forms.
- Work with Talent to improve role design, leveling, and how we evaluate candidates for technical positions.
- Use data and day-to-day signals to float retention concerns, gaps, and recurring friction early.
- Build practical fixes with People Ops, Legal, and Finance when a process is unclear, inconsistent, or no longer fits the company’s stage.
What Good Looks Like
- By day 30: You understand how the Technology organization works, its leaders, teams, priorities, critical roles, and decisions in motion. You have a clear cadence with the people you support. Every active performance or employee issue has an owner, a next step, and a decision framework.
- By day 60: Leaders bring you into team and talent decisions early enough to shape the outcome. You’ve surfaced the most important leadership, team, and talent risks, gave creative and sound recommendations, and found a simple cadence for leader check-ins and follow-through.
- By day 90: Managers are raising issues earlier, changes are better framed, and routine People work defaults to you; leaders see you as direct, useful, and grounded in the business. You've made significant contributions to evolving our People roadmap, insights, and tech stack.
What You’ll Bring
- 7+ years as a People Partner for technical teams with hands-on depth across employee relations, performance, compensation, leveling, succession, retention, and change.
- Strong judgment in complex & uncharted situations, including when to involve Legal or specialized expertise.
- 2+ years of experience supporting distributed, multi-country teams.
- A builder’s mindset: you create practical structure, communicate clearly, and keep the company moving through ambiguity.
- Curiosity and active investment in AI, data, and better tools, with good judgment about where automation helps and where people remain accountable.
- Strong familiarity with technical career pathing, levels, and compensation models.
- Experience building or improving People systems in a scaling company.
The Interview Process
- Meet with Lauren, Head of People & Talent
- Meet with Cami, Sr. Talent Partner
- Take home & 30, 60, 90 style presentation
- Meet with James, General Counsel
- Meet with Jay, VP of Strategy & Operations
- References
- Offer/Decision
Hiring is a big decision on both sides. Read more about our Hiring Philosophy and how we approach the process at Socket.
Benefits: Our benefits are crafted to support you and your family, so you can take care of what matters most and thrive in and outside of work. We offer:
- Market competitive salary bands
- Meaningful equity program
- Comprehensive health benefits for you and your family (99% coverage)
- Flexible time-off, holidays, and winter shutdown to rest & recharge
- Paid parental leave
- Remote-first, with quarterly team off-sites
At Socket, we
- Pursue Excellence: We set ourselves apart by consistently delivering work of exceptional quality and distinction.
- Move with urgency and focus: We prioritize swift, decisive action.
- Think rigorously: We care about being right and it often takes reasoning from first principles to get there. We value alternative perspectives and have constructive discussions.
- Trust and amplify: We overtrust, always assume good intent, and give specific feedback to help each other improve.
- Feel a strong sense of ownership: We wear many hats and feel a strong sense of overall ownership of the company and we're non-territorial regarding our nominal domains.
- Are customer obsessed: We relentlessly prioritize the needs of our customers, striving to exceed their expectations and delight them at every interaction.