HR Lead

Accountabilities:: As the HR Lead, you will serve as a trusted, hands-on people partner while building scalable HR and recruitment practices that support business and production needs. Own full-cycle recruitment across the studio, from intake and role definition through sourcing, interviews, offer negotiation, and closing. Plan hiring proactively with team leads and identify talent gaps before they impact production. Build clear role requirements, structured interview processes, technical assessments, scorecards, and consistent decision-making practices. Manage candidate pipelines, ATS workflows, recruiting metrics, and the overall candidate experience, ensuring timely communication and feedback. Coach managers on interviewing, hiring decisions, HR policies, and people-management practices. Benchmark salaries and design competitive, internally consistent offers aligned with market conditions and budget requirements. Own onboarding processes to ensure new hires receive the access, context, support, and guidance needed to become productive quickly. Manage HR operations including employment contracts, payroll processes and forecasts, leave management, benefits, employee records, and offboarding. Handle terminations professionally and fairly, ensuring compliance with applicable employment law and internal policies. Act as a neutral and approachable HR partner for conflicts, frustrations, personal challenges, and sensitive employee matters. Identify unhealthy team dynamics and encourage ownership, direct communication, and constructive problem-solving. Monitor early indicators of attrition and help address engagement and retention risks. Partner with the wider HR team on engagement, well-being, inclusion, psychological safety, and team-building initiatives. Work closely with senior leadership to strengthen company culture, values, and the overall employee experience. Introduce practical tools and processes that improve HR workflows and support a self-managing, remote team. Requirements The ideal candidate brings broad HR experience, strong recruitment expertise, and the confidence to operate independently in a dynamic technology environment. You should be comfortable balancing strategic people initiatives with hands-on operational responsibilities and sensitive employee matters. 7+ years of HR experience, including experience within medium-to-large technology companies. Strong full-cycle recruitment experience across technology or gaming environments, including technical and creative positions. Demonstrated ability to run hiring processes that are both efficient and rigorous, using structured interviews and scorecards. Hands-on experience with salary benchmarking, offer design, negotiation, and closing candidates. Experience across broader HR functions including onboarding, employee relations, HR operations, and employee lifecycle management. Confidence handling conflicts and difficult conversations with neutrality, sound judgment, and an understanding of team dynamics. Experience managing dynamic candidate pipelines and maintaining strong candidate experiences. Experience partnering with senior leadership to build culture and improve the people and work environment. Strong autonomy, organization, prioritization, and ownership, with the ability to lead HR improvements proactively. Approachable, trustworthy, and capable of recognizing when an issue needs to be escalated. Fluent English with excellent written and verbal communication skills. Daily familiarity with AI tools and curiosity about using AI to improve HR workflows and processes. Comfortable working with Atlassian tools, including Jira and Confluence, and able to understand Jira projects and reports. Experience using Slack as part of a structured communication culture. Genuine interest in games and players, with an appreciation for hiring people who share that passion. Nice to have: Experience working within fully remote, multi-country teams. Knowledge of Maltese employment law or experience hiring across multiple EU countries. Training or certification in coaching, mediation, or conflict resolution. Experience with HR analytics, including engagement surveys, attrition, and absence tracking. Personal interest in gaming, particularly multiplayer or competitive shooters. Benefits Fully remote work within Europe. Opportunity to shape HR practices, company culture, and the employee experience in a growing remote organization. Significant ownership and autonomy across recruitment, HR operations, engagement, and people initiatives. Close collaboration with senior leadership and cross-disciplinary teams. A collaborative, open, and self-managing working environment built around trust and communication. Opportunity to contribute to a player-focused game development environment and help build a team passionate about games. Exposure to international HR practices across a distributed European workforce.