People Programs and Total Rewards Architect

At LangChain, our mission is to make intelligent agents ubiquitous. We build the foundation for agent engineering in the real world, helping developers move from prototypes to production-ready AI agents that teams can rely on. We began as widely adopted open-source tools and have grown to also offer a platform for building, evaluating, deploying, and operating agents at scale.

Today, LangChain, LangGraph, LangSmith, and Agent Builder are used by teams shipping real AI products across startups and large enterprises. Millions of developers trust LangChain to power AI teams at companies like Replit, Clay, Coinbase, Workday, Lyft, Cloudflare, Harvey, Rippling, Vanta, and 35% of the Fortune 500.

With $125M raised at Series B from IVP, Sequoia, Benchmark, CapitalG, and Sapphire Ventures, we’re at a stage where we’re continuing to develop new products, growth is accelerating, and all team members have meaningful impact on what we build and how we work together. LangChain is a place where your contributions can shape how this technology shows up in the real world.

The People team at LangChain is architecting the operating system for the team behind the agents. Our charter is to make LangChain the best place to work, building the foundational infrastructure—from recruiting and global rewards to performance systems and AI upskilling—that empowers our team to achieve our mission of making agents ubiquitous. We treat the entire employee lifecycle as a product: modular, intentional, and designed for high-velocity iteration. We act as our own internal lab, dogfooding LangChain to automate the mundane and ensure our team stays focused on the high-judgment, high-impact work that moves the needle for our mission.

Location: San Francisco, CA or New York, NY

We are looking for a foundational People Programs & Total Rewards Architect to build the engine that will power LangChain’s next phase of growth.

This isn't a traditional HR administer and maintain role. This is a high-agency, technical builder role for someone who views People programs as a product to be engineered. You will architect and operationalize how LangChain rewards, recognizes, and retains elite talent in a world where the future of work is being rewritten by AI. You will partner closely cross-functionally to build a global rewards and performance infrastructure that is competitive, equitable, and modular.

The systems you build today will define how we scale tomorrow.

• Architect the Reward Engine: Design and deploy a global compensation philosophy from first principles. You’ll build the frameworks for salary bands, leveling, and promotion guidelines that stay ahead of the hyper-competitive AI talent market.

• AI-Native Operations: Lead the charge in integrating AI agents and LLM-driven workflows into People Programs and Total Rewards. Your goal is to automate and leverage agents to handle the tactical (internal FAQs, synthesizing performance feedback, building job architecture) so you can focus on the complex underlying strategy, philosophy, and change management. Use our own tech stack to automate the "ops" out of People Ops.

• Future of Work Lab: Partner with our Applied AI team to drive company-wide adoption of AI tools, rethinking how AI-augmented roles change our definitions of performance, upskilling, and career velocity.

• Equity Strategy & Education: Own the evolution of our global equity programs. You’ll manage forecasting and modeling while ensuring every LangChain team member deeply understands the value of their stake in our mission.

• Performance Engineering: Design and run high-velocity performance and development programs that emphasize impact over activity, ensuring talent density remains elite as we scale.

• Data-Driven Influence: Build real-time dashboards and predictive analytics to help leadership make future-proof decisions on workforce planning and pay equity.

• 6-10+ Years of Building: You have scaled People programs or Total Rewards at a high-growth tech startup.

• Extreme Agency: You don't wait for a playbook; you write it. You are comfortable in the messy middle of hyper-growth and can navigate ambiguity with a technical mindset.

• AI Fluency: You aren’t just a user of AI; you are an enthusiast. You understand how to leverage agents, prompt engineering, and automation to do the work of a team of five.

• Quantitative Rigor: You treat a cap table and a budget like a logic puzzle. You are a pro at compensation modeling, data visualization, and financial discipline.

• Product Mindset: You approach People programs with a "version 1.0 vs. version 2.0" mentality. You know when to ship a pragmatic solution and when to iterate for scale.

• Global Mindset: You’ve built for distributed teams and understand the nuances of designing for a global workforce.

Soft skills / experiences:

• Radical Clarity: You can translate a complex Black-Scholes model or a tiered equity strategy into a Slack message that a new grad actually understands and values.

• Systems Thinking vs. Rigid Rules: You don't build processes for the sake of process. You understand how a change in compensation impacts recruiting velocity, which impacts burn rate, which impacts product delivery.

• High EQ + Low Ego: You handle some of the company’s most sensitive data with absolute discretion and act as a neutral, trusted advisor to both leadership and ICs.

• Conflict as a Catalyst: You don’t shy away from the friction; you use data and empathy to drive to a fair resolution.

How You Exemplify Our Operating Principles:

We don't just put these on the wall; they are the filters for how we build our People programs.

• Build Something Great: You don’t default to standard HR. You design thoughtful, durable reward systems with a high bar for quality, aiming to make LangChain the most talent-dense company in AI.

• Embrace Hot Takes: You bring informed, non-consensus opinions to the table. You aren’t afraid to kill best practices that don't work for us and propose innovative, AI-first alternatives.

• Maximum Agency: You are a team of one who acts like a team of ten. You take ownership of ambiguous problems and build solutions from first principles without needing a playbook.

• Run to the Roar: You lean into the most complex scaling challenges, rather than avoiding them.

Nice to Have:

• Technical Builder: Experience with SQL, Python, or advanced automation tools (Claude Code, Cursor, or LangChain:) to bridge the gap between data and actionable insights.

• Global Expansion Playbook: Experience designing and implementing localized Total Rewards programs across countries in APAC, EMEA, and LatAM.

• M&A Experience: You’ve helped integrate teams or compensation structures during acquisitions.

• Public Company Prep: An understanding of what “Enterprise Ready” looks like (SOX compliance, rigorous audit trails) and can bake that into our systems now so we don't have to rebuild them later.

• We offer competitive compensation that includes base salary, meaningful equity, and benefits such as health and dental coverage, flexible vacation, a 401(k) plan, and life insurance. Actual compensation will vary based on role, level, and location. For team members in the EU and UK, we provide locally competitive benefits aligned with regional norms and regulations.

• Annual salary range: $150,000 - $215,000