Staff People and Learning Partner

About this role

What we’re building

The marine industry supports recreation, global commerce, and national defense. And yet it runs on technology that hasn't meaningfully changed in fifty years. Until now. Arc is on a mission to electrify the marine industry. We're rethinking powertrains, software, and vessel designs from first principles. And we're already executing. We started with consumers to develop and harden our core technology. We’re now scaling production of our flagship model with new models and sectors on the horizon. Now we’re extending our platform to commercial applications, starting with tugs, ferries, and defense, with years worth of signed contracts and a pipeline that spans every vessel type on the water.

The technology is proven, the momentum is building, and the opportunity is enormous. The marine industry is going electric and Arc is building the platform that powers it.

Who we’re looking for

As Arc's Staff People and Learning Partner, you will own the people strategy for our Sales, Service, and G&A organizations while building the manager development and career growth systems the whole company runs on. That means acting as the trusted advisor to leaders across those functions on org design, performance, and employee relations; designing and facilitating the training that raises the bar on how Arc manages; and building career pathways that give individual contributors a clear line of sight to what's next.

Roughly 40% of your time will be spent on learning and development, primarily for managers, with a meaningful share dedicated to IC career pathways. This is not a coordinator role bolted onto a generalist job. You will own the curriculum, teach it yourself, and measure impact.

You'll report to our Senior Staff People Partner and partner closely with functional leaders. The work spans exempt corporate teams, commissioned sales, and a field-based service organization, so you'll need range.

We're looking for someone fired up by the mission and ready to build. You'll thrive here if you move fast, take ownership, and care about the details. This is a full-time, on-site role at our Los Angeles headquarters.

What You'll Do

• Business partnership: Sales, Service & G&A

• Partnering with leaders across Sales, Service, and G&A on organizational design, headcount planning, reporting structures, and spans of control as those teams scale.

• Coaching managers through the full performance cycle: goal setting, calibration, feedback, promotion cases, and performance improvement, grounded in Arc's leveling guidelines.

• Conducting employee relations investigations end-to-end, counseling employees and leadership.

• Leading terminations and role changes with dignity, and owning communication with the teams they affect.

• Advising on California employment law, wage and hour compliance, and compensation practices across a mixed exempt, non-exempt, and commissioned population.

• Translating people data - attrition, engagement, promotion velocity - into insights leaders act on, and presenting the case behind them.

• Leading change management for policy, program, and process rollouts, preparing managers before their teams hear the news and serving as a source of stability through it.

• Providing constructive pushback and playing devil's advocate when it's warranted, then owning the communication and execution of the decision even when it differs from your own view.

Learning & development — 40% of the role

• Building and facilitating Arc's manager development curriculum, from first-time supervisor fundamentals through senior topics like coaching, delegation, difficult conversations, and performance calibration.

• Designing career pathways for individual contributors that make Arc's leveling framework concrete: what impact looks like at each level, which skills close the gap, and how to build them.

• Running skills gap analyses with functional leaders and turning them into learning roadmaps tied to business priorities rather than training for training's sake.

• Facilitating live workshops, cohort programs, and onboarding content yourself, supplementing with outside vendors only where they clearly outperform.

• Measuring program effectiveness against behavior change and business outcomes, then iterating on what the data tells you.

• Building the templates, documentation, and systems that let these programs scale beyond you, so managers in Engineering and Production can run the same playbooks without your calendar as the bottleneck.

• Mentoring junior members of the People team and contributing to their professional and career growth.

Minimum Qualifications

• Experience as a People Partner or HRBP supporting go-to-market, service, or corporate functions, including direct support of director-level and above leaders (typically 8+ years of progressive People experience, though strong performance outweighs years).

• Demonstrated experience building a manager training or leadership development program from scratch — needs analysis, curriculum design, and live facilitation, not just program administration.

• Experience designing and rolling out career frameworks, competency models, or leveling guidelines that employees and managers actually use.

• Strong knowledge of CA employment law, wage and hour regulations, compensation practices, and benefits strategies.

• Proven ability to conduct and document employee relations investigations independently and defensibly.

• Experience in people analytics and leveraging data to inform decision-making.

• Ability to influence without authority at every level, from front-line supervisors to the executive team, adapting your approach to the audience.

• Ability to work on-site at our Los Angeles headquarters.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience in a high-growth manufacturing, hardware, automotive, or aerospace environment.

• Background supporting a commissioned sales team, including partnering on comp plan design, or a field-based service organiza

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