Senior HR Business Partner & Generalist

About the role

Yaqeen has grown to roughly 130 people, with HR practices that need to be continuously evolved for the future. The Senior HR Business Partner & Generalist is the operational backbone. The trusted partner managers come to, the person who runs the employee lifecycle end to end, and the one who turns informal practices into clean, documented, repeatable systems.

This is not a pure-execution generalist role and it is not a pure-HRBP role, it is both. You will draft offer letters and resolve employee-relations cases in the same week, and run onboarding in Rippling while coaching a manager through a hard conversation in the same day. Reporting to the Director of People, you work directly with managers across every function. If that range energizes you, at a mission-driven organization where Islamic values and human dignity sit at the center of the work, this is the role for you.

What you'll do

HR Business Partnership (across all departments)

• Be the day-to-day People partner to Research, Content/Media, Engineering & Product, and Operations, the first call for hiring, performance, employee relations, and team-health questions.
• Coach through routine and difficult conversations: performance feedback, conflict, accommodation requests, and departures.
• Handle employee-relations cases end to end, intake, investigation, documentation, resolution, escalating to the Director of People when warranted.
• Interpret policy consistently across functions and surfaces where policy is unclear, missing, or out of date.

Full employee lifecycle execution

• Recruiting: partner with hiring managers on intake, job postings, screening, interview coordination, and offers.
• Onboarding & off boarding: own the new-hire and exit experience, including paperwork, Rippling setup, equipment coordination with IT, orientation, and exit interviews.
• Performance & development: administer review cycles, track completion, support managers through calibration, and coordinate development conversations.
• Compensation & benefits administration: manage open enrollment, benefits questions, leave administration, and routine comp adjustments. Executing the cycle while setting the framework with the Director of People.

Operations, systems & documentation

• Make Rippling the source of truth: clean data, build and maintain workflows, automate manual steps, and run reports on demand.
• Manage People-function operations in ClickUp and keep the policy and process library current and discoverable in Confluence.
• Use Slack as the primary intake channel for People questions - fast, kind, and consistent.
• Document what currently lives in people’s heads, turning informal practices into written processes managers can actually follow.
• Track and report simple People metrics (headcount, time-to-fill, turnover, case volume) so the function operates on data, not impressions.

Compliance & culture

• Keep Yaqeen compliant on employment-law basics — I-9s, classifications, leave, posting requirements, record keeping, and flag issues early.
• Support culture practices and tarbiya rhythms that make the workplace genuinely values-aligned, in collaboration with the Director of People.

Qualifications

Required

• Mission alignment: genuine commitment to Islamic values and their authentic application in a modern workplace, and to building inclusive practices that honor diverse backgrounds within shared values.
• 5–8 years of progressive HR experience, with at least 2 years in a Generalist or HRBP role at a 100–300 person organization. You have carried real cases and real cycles, not just supported them.
• Full-lifecycle range: working experience across recruiting, onboarding, employee relations, benefits administration, and performance. Solid practical fluency in each.
• HRBP fluency: you’ve partnered directly with managers (not just executives), can coach through hard conversations, and know when to escalate.
• Strong US employment-law grounding for everyday situations — classifications, leave, accommodation, terminations, documentation.
• Hands-on HRIS experience (Rippling preferred; comparable system experience welcome), with a track record of using tooling and automation to replace manual work.
• Operating-system fluency: comfortable in Slack, ClickUp, and Confluence, or able to ramp on them quickly.
• Process-building instinct: you’ve taken informal or scattered HR practices and turned them into documented, repeatable systems.

Preferred Skills

• Experience in mission-driven organizations, nonprofit, social impact, or values-driven companies.
• Recruiting depth, particularly for knowledge-worker roles (research, content, engineering, product).
• PHR, SHRM-CP, or equivalent certification.
• Experience in Islamic, faith-based, or interfaith organizations.
• Familiarity with AI / automation tooling for HR workflows (screening, drafting, document handling).

Assignment

Resume plus a brief note (a few paragraphs is fine) on a process or system you took from messy to working. We’re looking for evidence of how you think about cleaning things up, not a polished essay.

Yaqeen Institute embraces a philosophy that values and promotes diversity. Our goal is to attract, develop, retain, and advance a talented and diverse workforce within a culture where all employees are empowered to reach their fullest potential.

Please note that all career opportunities at Yaqeen Institute are subject to a three-month probationary period, during which we assess performance, alignment with our values, and mutual fit to ensure long-term success in the role.

Full-Time: 40 hours/week

About Yaqeen Institute

Yaqeen is a nonprofit on a mission to pioneer Islamic research in creative, cutting-edge formats tailored to meet people where they are — dismantling doubt through well-researched truth, nurturing conviction by strengthening belief with practical and spiritual guidance, and inspiring contribution by reviving our tradition of faithful changemakers, insha’Allah.