Level

Nscale

Director, People Performance & Measurement

Nscale is hiring a Director, People Performance & Measurement in San Francisco and Seattle, United States. It pays $160k-$280k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Nscale.

Level's read on this job

  • Level rates this role Little AI ●○○○: aI is not part of the work.
  • Tools and skills the posting cites include Workday, performance management and people analytics.
  • Level classifies it as a lead role.
  • Level lists 287 other open roles at Nscale.

AI in this role

Design and implement individual performance measurement and feedback systems for a GPU cloud infrastructure company.

workday
performance-managementpeople-analyticscompensationorganizational-design

About Nscale

Nscale is the GPU cloud engineered for AI. We provide cost-effective, high-performance infrastructure for AI start-ups and large enterprise customers. Nscale enables AI-focused companies to achieve superior results by reducing the complexity of AI development. Our GPU cloud bolsters technical capabilities and directly supports strategic business outcomes, including cost management, rapid innovation, and environmental responsibility.

The challenge

At Nscale, the mission is the boss. Today, the mission is execution.

Performance at Nscale covers two things. How each person is doing, and how well our teams and business run. Both are part of the operational excellence we're building. In the People team, we break great execution into five things an organization needs, an acronym we use called SAAFU. An organization needs to be:

  • Steerable: there’s a shared way of setting goals and direction.
  • Analyzable: we can measure and demonstrate where we are winning and losing as a business.
  • Accountable: single owners for what matters, with regular check-ins.
  • Frictionless: free of the friction that wastes energy, but not the friction that's there on purpose!
  • Understandable: everyone can see why we're doing what we're doing, and what matters right now.

This role doesn't own all five of these. This is built together with the Chiefs of Staff, our leaders, and the executive team. But it's the voice asking whether we're actually living up to them, and it owns one piece of "Accountable" directly: individual performance systems and feedback. The test: if you ask a manager what they expect from their team, then ask the team, there should be zero daylight between them.

What you'll own

You'll build the system that makes clear how we assess, reward, and improve performance, in close partnership with our compensation team on how that lands in someone's pay.

  • Build and embed the performance and feedback culture: the cadence, the tooling, the systems, and how it actually reaches a manager and a team, not just the paperwork behind it.
  • Own the requirements for our performance tech platform, working directly with engineering.
  • Partner with the business on driving organizational priorities, functional performance metrics and reporting, and the line that connects a rating to reward.
  • Partner with each function to make sure what they're measuring is real and measurable, across Sales, Data Centers, AI Infrastructure and Cloud/Software, where almost nothing runs the same way twice. The targets stay theirs. You're the partner who pressure-tests them.
  • Run the center of expertise for how we think about and act on performance, so Exceptional means the same thing wherever it's given, and co-run calibration with the People Partners at year end.

What you'll bring

You've built a company-wide performance or measurement system before, spanning team and individual, at a large or fast-scaling organisation. You've taken it in front of senior leadership and held your own there. You've worked across more than one kind of business. Sales, Data Centres and Engineering don't run on the same rhythm, and you've proven you can design for genuinely different contexts rather than stretch one template across all of them. 

You think like an operator as much as a designer. You're hands on, not someone who delegates the hard parts to a junior. You build it, and you keep running it yourself. 

This job likely isn't for you if:

  • You want a single, familiar playbook you can apply everywhere.
  • You'd rather advise on measurement than run the mechanics yourself.
  • You're looking for a steady, slow-moving build.
  • You want senior leadership exposure without having designed what you're presenting.

Your first six to nine months:

  • Lock the functional metrics and goal cascade for every vertical, agreed with function leads, ready before a quarter starts.
  • Stand up the mechanics that connect a rating to reward, and take it in front of senior leadership once.
  • Run your first full quarterly cycle and your first year-end calibration, alongside the People Partners.

When you apply

Add a note to the end of your resume that clearly identifies one system you've built that connects a measure to a real outcome, and one sentence on how you know it worked. That's far more useful to us than a cover letter.

The range below reflects the base salary for the position. Actual compensation may vary based on job-related factors such as skill set, experience, education, and location. In addition to base salary, this role may be eligible for bonus, equity, and/or commission programs. Nscale may offer a competitive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, flexible paid time off, parental leave, and retirement plan participation.

Salary Range$160,000—$280,000 USD

For information on how Nscale handles candidate personal data, please see our Employee & Candidate Privacy Notice: Here.

Nscale does not accept unsolicited candidate submissions from recruitment agencies.

How we rate this

Director, People Performance & Measurement at Nscale rates 10 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Little AI (AI Level 1 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Little AI. AI is not part of the work.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

Performance ManagementPeople AnalyticsCompensationOrganizational DesignWorkday

Questions you could be asked

  1. Tell me about a project where performance management was part of your work. What did you do?
  2. Tell me about a project where people analytics was part of your work. What did you do?
  3. Tell me about a project where compensation was part of your work. What did you do?
  4. Tell me about a project where organizational design was part of your work. What did you do?
  5. Walk me through how you've used Workday in your day-to-day work.

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: Performance Management, People Analytics, Compensation, Organizational Design, and Workday. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.

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