About Airbound

Our mission is to make a world where everyone has access to delivery. Where goods move as freely as information moves today.

This is possible. Today the cost of moving on a scooter is ₹2/km. That’s the cost of moving a 150kg mass from point A to B. We’re bringing that mass down to less than 5kgs, concurrently bringing the cost down to 10 paise/km. This is how we make deliveries a reality. This is how we create a world where we’re doing billions of deliveries per day.

The tech is not there. The current cost of drone delivery is ₹100/km. We need to completely redefine the way things are done here. We’re building the world’s most efficient aircraft from the ground-up, and scaling that up to beyond anything the aerospace sector has ever seen. This cannot be an iterative process. We have to tear down all conventions and build everything up from scratch.

To do this, we need nothing less than the best engineers. The ones who care about building something fundamentally different, who are deeply curious about understanding the fundamentals of everything they’re working on, who are dreamers that believe in the impossible.

About the Role

The HR Business Partner is the connective tissue between Airbound’s people and its mission. You will partner directly with engineering, manufacturing, operations, and business leaders to build an organization that can scale from 150 people to many times that, without losing the speed and ownership that make us work. This is a first hire role on the people-partnering side. You will design how we manage performance, grow managers, resolve people issues, and keep culture intact as we scale across locations, in an aerospace company that moves faster than the sector has ever attempted. Hiring is owned by our Talent Acquisition team. You own everything that happens once great people are here: how they land, how they grow, how they’re led, how they’re rewarded, and how they stay.

Key Responsibilities

Partner with leaders across engineering, manufacturing, and operations as their trusted advisor on team structure, performance, and people decisions

Own the post-hire experience in partnership with Talent Acquisition: pick up the handoff at signing and run onboarding, orientation, and 30-60-90 integration so new joiners ramp and stick

Build and run performance management, from goal setting and review cycles to calibration and feedback, and improve it as we scale

Coach managers through hard conversations, team gaps, and growth planning, raising the bar on how we lead

Own employee relations end to end surface issues early, investigate fairly, and resolve them cleanly

Design and roll out people policies, compensation frameworks, and compliance practices from scratch, tuned for a fast-moving hardware company

Partner on organization design and workforce planning as teams form, split, and grow across locations

Drive engagement, retention, and culture, keeping a real pulse on how the team is doing and acting on it before small problems become big ones

Maintain accurate people data and documentation as the company grows

Qualifications

Must-Have

5+ years in HR business partnering, people operations, or a generalist HR role, ideally in fast-paced, engineering-first hardware or manufacturing environments

Previous experience in the hardware, manufacturing, or aerospace talent landscape, and what it takes to grow and retain that talent

Sharp judgment: you flag team risks and people issues in real time, before they become problems

Strong track record coaching managers and leaders, and handling employee relations with fairness and discretion

Experience owning onboarding and the post-hire ramp, and partnering cleanly with recruiting on the handoff

Experience building people processes, policies, and performance systems from scratch, not just running ones that already exist

Disciplined and process-driven, with a bias toward clean documentation and tight operational control

Excellent communication, documentation, and cross-functional collaboration skills