Who Gets Hired and Onto Which Teams
You don't join Humaans to maintain an HRIS. You join to replace the back office entirely.
The pitch is explicit: traditional HR software creates more work than it saves. Every "streamlined" workflow still needs someone to push buttons, chase approvals, answer the same questions. Humaans is building Athena, an agentic AI layer that doesn't just store people data — it acts on it. Onboarding that runs itself. Questions answered instantly. Changes made automatically. That mission shapes every hiring decision.
The team sits at roughly 36 people split across London and San Francisco (BuiltIn, September 2026). Zero G Talent's board lists six open roles: Account Executive Mid-Market (London), Senior Product Designer (London), Product Design Lead (London), Founding US Sales Associate - Agentic AI (San Francisco), Senior Software Engineer Full Stack (London), Founding US GTM Lead - Agentic AI (San Francisco). Third-party tracker EngRadar shows 12 open roles as of October 2026 (six engineering, two product, two sales, one design, one other) with a median posting age of 78 days; Alion reports a median age of 227 days across its tracked postings.
Every role is listed as on-site. London covers product, engineering, design, mid-market sales, GTM engineering, sales development leadership, security GRC, and product implementation. San Francisco hosts the nascent U.S. go-to-market effort: Founding US Sales Associate - Agentic AI and Founding US GTM Lead - Agentic AI (Zero G Talent's board reports; the public careers page lists Founding US BDR - Agentic AI and Founding US Enterprise Account Executive - Agentic AI). The Mid-Market AE lists a $50k–$100k base; other bands are undisclosed. Equity comes with a five-year exercise window. Benefits: 25 days PTO plus holidays, private health insurance, enhanced parental leave (16 weeks primary, four secondary), learning budget, free lunch.
Before a candidate reaches an interview, the screen filters for three things. First, technical depth matching the stack: TypeScript, React, Node, Kubernetes, Redis, OpenAI APIs. Engineering roles demand production-grade full-stack experience (Alion and JobScroller's tech-stack data shows). Second, domain fluency: sales candidates need four-plus years selling into mid-market or enterprise SaaS (Alion's role requirements indicate). Third, alignment with five values the founders treat as behavioral prerequisites, not wall art: "Deliver outcomes fast," "Own your edge," "Default to possibility," "Act like an owner," "Lead with curiosity" (verbatim from careers page).
The process makes this concrete: introductory call, take-home task or coding challenge, onsite competency interview, meet the founders. No panel rounds. The take-home is the gate; it mirrors the actual work ("No leetcode questions, just real problem-solving together") (careers page).
The careers page puts it plainly: "We have the product, the customers, the team, and the runway. What we need is more incredible people who want to build something that lasts." That sentence is the filter.
What It Pays
Humaans publishes salary bands only when a role lists through the Zero G Talent board. One live posting discloses a range: Account Executive, Mid-Market in London at $50,000–$100,000. The other five current listings (Senior Product Designer, Product Design Lead, Founding US Sales Associate, Senior Software Engineer (Full Stack), Founding US GTM Lead) show no band. The public careers page describes compensation only as "market-leading."
| Role | Location | Posted Salary Band (USD/year) |
|---|---|---|
| Account Executive, Mid-Market | London | $50,000 – $100,000 |
| Senior Product Designer | London | Not disclosed |
| Product Design Lead | London | Not disclosed |
| Founding US Sales Associate – Agentic AI | San Francisco | Not disclosed |
| Senior Software Engineer (Full Stack) | London | Not disclosed |
| Founding US GTM Lead – Agentic AI | San Francisco | Not disclosed |
Equity is the lever Humaans emphasizes. Every offer includes stock options with a five-year post-termination exercise window — letting a departing employee hold options for years, not the standard 90 days. BuiltIn's 2026 analysis calls this "employee-friendly ownership" and notes it "materially reduces golden-handcuffs risk." The company does not publish strike prices, vesting schedules, or the percentage of the option pool allocated to new hires; candidates should ask at offer stage.
Benefits are spelled out on the careers page: 25 days PTO plus public holidays; private health insurance covering medical, dental, and vision (UK details best documented); parental leave at 16 weeks for primary caregivers, four for secondary; learning budget; MacBook and accessories for every new hire. The London office adds free lunch on Thursdays, quarterly team events, annual offsites.
Retirement provisions are absent from public materials. BuiltIn flags "Inadequate Retirement Support: Public materials do not mention retirement plans or employer match, leaving the availability and generosity of retirement benefits unclear"; candidates should verify location-specific details before accepting.
BuiltIn's AI analysis of candidate feedback characterizes sales compensation as "competitive but not top tier, and quota attainment is described as middling. Variable pay may underdeliver against on-target expectations for some roles under these conditions." The same analysis suggests "some engineering perspectives describe harder work for less money than top-paying firms."
Location-based pay differences are not published. With only one role showing a band and that role seated in London, there is no public evidence of a San Francisco premium or remote discount. The safest approach: treat the $50k–$100k London band as a single data point and ask the recruiter for the relevant band before advancing deep into the process.
How the Hiring Process Works and What Gets Candidates Through It
Humaans describes its process in three words: simple, human, fair. The goal is to help both sides figure out fit — no puzzle boxes, no performative rounds (careers page).
Glassdoor (New Zealand) shows six interview questions and five reviews total, a volume consistent with a team that hires deliberately in small batches. One candidate reported a phone screen within two days of recruiter contact, praising the speed but noting the conversation "fell short of expectations" (Glassdoor, verbatim).
The published values operate as the de facto rubric. "Deliver outcomes fast" suggests interviewers look for evidence you've shipped and can articulate what moved the needle. "Own your edge" translates to ownership narratives: a time you took a messy problem end-to- end, accepted the miss, recovered without being asked. "Default to possibility" screens for people who treat constraints as design parameters, not stop signs. "Act like an owner" and "Lead with curiosity" appear together: candidates who ask sharp, product-level questions about Athena's agent architecture or the integration strategy (Okta, Greenhouse, DocuSign, Pento, Contractbook, Workable per TechCrunch and EU-Startups) signal they've done the homework and think like builders, not ticket-takers.
A strong application leads with concrete outcomes. The roles currently on the board all sit at the intersection of product depth and customer proximity. Engineers should walk through a recent feature they owned from spec to production, including trade-offs and metrics moved. Designers need portfolios showing systems thinking — how the component library scaled, how research informed a pivot. Go-to-market candidates should bring pipeline numbers, but also a narrative about selling a product that didn't fully exist yet, because that is the job: selling Athena before the market has a category for it.
What disqualifies is the inverse of the values. Vague "collaborated on" language without a clear personal contribution line. Inability to name a specific failure and the corrective action taken. Treating the interview as a Q&A instead of a working session — the team expects you to push back, propose alternatives, reason aloud. One Glassdoor reviewer's disappointment hints that candidates who coast on pedigree or rehearsed answers don't last long. The process is short by design; there is no hiding place.
Location matters operationally. London is the engineering and product center; San Francisco is the beachhead for the U.S. agentic-AI push. The process does not vary by site, same values, same speed, but the conversation in San Francisco skews toward zero-to-one GTM motion, while London loops go deeper on platform architecture and the Athena roadmap. Candidates should prepare for the site's center of gravity.
The company publishes no stage count, no take-home policy, no panel composition. That opacity is intentional: a small team changes the loop per role. What is fixed is the filter — high agency, high craft, low ego. If you need a map to find your way through the interview, you've already signaled the wrong thing.
Where the Work Happens
Humaans runs on two hubs. Headquarters sits in London, where the company was founded in 2020 and where most product and engineering roles are based. The second hub is San Francisco, hosting the nascent U.S. go-to-market effort built around the Athena agentic AI layer. The split maps directly to how the organization structures its work.
London is the product and engineering center of gravity. Every core product role the board has listed (Senior Software Engineer (Full Stack), Senior Product Designer, Product Design Lead) is based there. So is the mid-market Account Executive, signaling that UK and European sales motion still runs from the home office. Founders Giovanni Luperti and Karolis Narkevicius operate out of London, and the "direct access to founders and decisions" the company cites as a cultural marker is a London-office reality (BuiltIn: "Founder-Led Hiring Touchpoint — The 'founders' conversation' in the documented interview loop and the 'Founder Associate' role signal ongoing direct CEO access"). The team there owns the HRIS core, the integration layer (Okta, Google Workspace, Microsoft, Pento, DocuSign, Contractbook, Greenhouse, TeamTailor, Lever, Ashby, Workable per EU-Startups), and the newer Tables product for large-scale people-data manipulation (Tech.eu). Shipping cadence is visible and fast; BuiltIn notes "frequent integrations, and visible shipping cadence signals strong product momentum." If you join in London, you sit next to the people who decide what ships next.
San Francisco plays a different function. The two active postings on Zero G Talent's board (Founding US Sales Associate - Agentic AI and Founding US GTM Lead - Agentic AI) carry "founding" in the title for a reason. These are the first hires building the U.S. commercial motion from zero. The work is outward-facing: pipeline generation, enterprise sales cycles, partnership conversations, feeding market signal back to London product. The "Agentic AI" qualifier ties the role to Athena, not the legacy HRIS. Candidates should expect high ambiguity, minimal process, and founder proximity from reporting into a GTM lead with a direct line to Luperti. The trade-off is distance from the engineering core; product decisions are made in London, and the SF office feels that latency.
The company lists all current roles as on-site (careers page, Alion, EngRadar). The data shows a 36-person headcount (BuiltIn) split across two cities: London carries product, design, engineering, and European commercial; San Francisco carries the nascent U.S. GTM effort. Expansion signals from the 2022 Series A ("consolidating its U.K. presence and expansion into the broader EU market" (TechCrunch, verbatim)) suggest London hiring will remain the primary vector. The U.S. hub will grow only as fast as Agentic AI traction justifies it.
For a candidate, the location choice is a choice of problem set. London offers depth on a mature product with a live customer base (Pleo, Juro, Birdie, Fidel API, Fonoa, Manyone, Pento per TechCrunch, Tech.eu, EU-Startups) and a team that has already solved zero-to-one integration and workflow problems. San Francisco offers the blank-sheet challenge of taking an AI-native HR feature set into a competitive HRIS market, with autonomy to define the playbook, but without the guardrails of an established motion. Neither site is a satellite; both are load-bearing. The question is which load you want to carry.
Who Thrives Here
The people who stay and grow at Humaans share a recognizable profile: operators who treat ambiguity as a design constraint rather than a blocker, and measure progress by what ships. The company's own workplace summary describes a "founder-close, AI-first culture that grants outsized ownership but demands rapid, above-and-beyond execution amid evolving processes" (BuiltIn, verbatim). That sentence captures the trade-off. You get decision proximity — the documented interview loop includes a founders' conversation, and a Founding US GTM Lead role for the agentic AI product line signals ongoing direct CEO access (BuiltIn, Zero G Talent board) — but you also inherit the context-switching that comes with rapid iteration around Athena and shifting scopes as the product expands from core HRIS into workflow automation and the Tables reporting engine.
Product velocity is the organizing principle. Luperti and Narkevicius came from product design at Quibit (TechCrunch), and their stated pillars (customization, connectivity, world-class user experience) read like a brief for people who obsess over craft (EU-Startups: "Customisation/flexibility is one of the three pillars guiding our product vision, together with connectivity and a world-class user experience"). The team ships integrations at a cadence that includes those tools in a single year (EU-Startups). Candidates who thrive here tend to have built in similarly dense integration surfaces and can articulate why a "best-in-class stack" approach (the phrase used by Juro's Senior Director of People & Talent, Thomas Forstner (EU-Startups, verbatim)) beats the all-in-one bloat dominating the HRIS market.
The mission side is specific: HR teams are burning out. Workvivo surveys cited by Luperti put the overwhelm rate at 95–98 percent, with 71–78 percent feeling undervalued or open to leaving (TechCrunch: "95% of HR workers say that they've felt overwhelmed... while 73% felt under-valued"; EU-Startups: "98% of HR professionals felt burned out... 78% are open to leaving their jobs and 71% do not feel valued"). Humaans positions itself as the layer that lets those professionals stop managing spreadsheets and start making decisions. People who connect with that problem, often because they've lived it as operators, founders, or early employees at scaling companies, sustain motivation when the pace spikes. The customer roster (Pleo managing 1,000 people across 50 sites, Juro, Fidel API, Birdie, Fonoa) proves the product works at complexity (EU-Startups: "Pleo who use our technology to manage its team of 1,000 distributed across close to 50 global sites"), but it also means the engineering and product bar stays high: enterprise-grade security and responsive support are public expectations, not aspirations.
Compensation transparency matters. The board posts a band of $50k–$100k for the Account Executive role (median $100k per board data) with stock options on a five-year exercise window, 25 days PTO, private health insurance, and up to 16/4 weeks parental leave. Candidates who benchmark against FAANG packages will frustrate themselves; the ones who stay treat the equity upside and the learning curve as the variable components of total compensation. Glassdoor reviews consistently highlight leadership's trust and investment in personal growth, a supportive collaborative atmosphere, and the feeling of being valued — but they sit alongside BuiltIn's flags on workload intensity, compensation tradeoffs versus big tech, and change fatigue.
The pattern is clear: thriving here requires accepting that the guardrails are still being built, that you will be the one building some of them, and that the reward is the steepest impact-to-headcount ratio in your career to date.
The back office doesn't replace itself. Someone has to write the agent that does.
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