Executive Director, People Business Partnering

Company: Recursion
Location: Salt Lake City
Posted on: June 2, 2025

Job Description:

Executive Director, People Business PartneringSalt Lake City, UtahYour work will change lives. Including your own.The Impact You'll Make:As the Executive Director, People Business Partnering, you will be a strategic advisor to Recursion's scientific and technical leadership helping progress ambitious business goals within our unique operating environment and culture. Your insights, people and organizational expertise, and keen judgement will support leadership teams as they create the conditions for their teams to do their best work, and the operating structures to enable it. You will bring candor, care, and courage to bear as you design talent strategies and organizational interventions to accelerate delivery and progress.As a leader within our People Team, you will be a trusted partner to designated business units (e.g. R&D), driving initiatives that improve organizational effectiveness and cultivate a high-performance culture across our global teams in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. You will manage and mentor a team of People Business Partners, guiding them in delivering strategic People support.This role is for you if you are deeply dissatisfied with the time it currently takes to discover and deliver life-saving therapies for patients, and are motivated to dedicate your time, energy and talents to experimenting with a new approach. It will be hard, fast-paced and a bit chaotic, but oh so rewarding.In This Role, You Will:

• Be a Strategic Advisor: Serve as an integrated part of the business, working closely with and advising senior leaders to accomplish broader strategic objectives. Partner with cross-functional leaders to understand and enhance team development and support.
• Drive Business Goals through People Initiatives: Partner with leadership to ensure that our people programs directly support the achievement of critical business objectives, translating strategic initiatives into actionable people plans.
• Empower Leaders and Managers: Provide expert coaching and guidance to managers on performance management, compensation strategies, and fostering strong team relationships. Equip managers to be effective people leaders, cultivating a culture of high performance and continuous development.
• Influence Organizational Dynamics: Partner with teams and leaders in the planning and implementation of workforce strategies and thoughtful changes in organizational structure or processes to support rapid growth, while driving organizational effectiveness and seamless change management.
• Be an Excellent Manager: Lead the global People Business Partner function, including setting strategy and team priorities, building strong team culture, cohesion and collaboration, and developing team members.
• Provide cohesive support: Partner with other People Teams (People Ops, Talent Acquisition, Total Rewards) and functional teams (Finance, IT, Comms, etc.) to align organizational objectives and provide seamless, integrated support for leaders and teams.
• Explore and learn continuously: Expand team's knowledge of novel approaches, experiments and best practices from other contexts and industries in order to expand internal thinking and build compelling solutions.The Team You Will Join:The People Team is the foundation of our company's workforce, creating the conditions to enable and sustain high performing teams, and helping employees do the best work of their careers. We are talent scouts and partners, creating experiences and outcomes that support our employees and drive business success. We focus on scalable solutions that add value across geographies, while providing individual advisory partnership and support where it matters most. With a people + data approach, we ensure Recursion has the people, culture, and operating dynamics to accelerate drug discovery and get medicines to patients faster.The Experience You'll Need:
  • 10+ years of progressive HR experience partnering with executive leadership in life sciences, pharma, biotech or tech-enabled, fast-paced industries
  • Strong business acumen with the ability to translate complex business objectives into strategic talent and organizational actions.
  • Experience managing and developing teams, both directly and indirectly.
  • Honed judgement skills to be able to advise on, and facilitate, complex decision-making in fast-paced environments.
  • Ability to diagnose team and leadership capabilities, and to apply OD concepts and models, such as team effectiveness, change management, communication styles, facilitation, and leadership development.
  • Passion for developing others and creating conditions for exceptional performance and employee retention.
  • Strong networking and trusted relationship building skills with an ability to influence without authority and challenge senior leaders to create the best outcome across different perspectives.
  • Analytical and problem-solving skills including the ability to diagnose root causes and use insights to inform decision-making.
  • Strong understanding of HR concepts, policies, and initiatives across domains (e.g. onboarding, learning and development, compliance, employee relations, engagement and retention, talent management, etc.)Working Location & Compensation:This is an office-based, hybrid position at our US headquarters located in Salt Lake City, UT. Employees are expected to work in the office at least 50% of the time.At Recursion, we believe that every employee should be compensated fairly. Based on the skill and level of experience required for this role, the estimated current annual base range for this role is $213,900 to $262,900 (USD). You will also be eligible for an annual bonus and equity compensation, as well as a comprehensive benefits package.The Values We Hope You Share:
    • We act boldly with integrity. We are unconstrained in our thinking, take calculated risks, and push boundaries, but never at the expense of ethics, science, or trust.
    • We care deeply and engage directly. Caring means holding a deep sense of responsibility and respect - showing up, speaking honestly, and taking action.
    • We learn actively and adapt rapidly. Progress comes from doing. We experiment, test, and refine, embracing iteration over perfection.
    • We move with urgency because patients are waiting. Speed isn't about rushing but about moving the needle every day.
    • We take ownership and accountability. Through ownership and accountability, we enable trust and autonomy-leaders take accountability for decisive action, and teams own outcomes together.
    • We are One Recursion. True cross-functional collaboration is about trust, clarity, humility, and impact. Through sharing, we can be greater than the sum of our individual capabilities.Our values underpin the employee experience at Recursion. They are the character and personality of the company demonstrated through how we communicate, support one another, spend our time, make decisions, and celebrate collectively.More About RecursionRecursion is a clinical stage TechBio company leading the space by decoding biology to industrialize drug discovery. Enabling its mission is the Recursion OS, a platform built across diverse technologies that continuously expands one of the world's largest proprietary biological and chemical datasets. Recursion leverages sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to distill from its dataset a collection of trillions of searchable relationships across biology and chemistry unconstrained by human bias. By commanding massive experimental scale - up to millions of wet lab experiments weekly - and massive computational scale - owning and operating one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, Recursion is uniting technology, biology and chemistry to advance the future of medicine.
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Keywords: Recursion, Layton , Executive Director, People Business Partnering, Executive , Salt Lake City, Utah