Organizational Development & Learning Lead

What We Are Looking For
This is a build-from-scratch senior individual contributor role for someone who wants to shape how a fast-growing AI company grows its people. You will be the team's thought partner on the hardest organizational questions, the person who designs and runs the research behind our answers, and the builder who turns that research into programs managers and ICs actually use.

You will diagnose the system, design the intervention, build it, deliver it, and stay accountable for whether it landed. You will work closely with the Head of People, who owns the executive-facing org strategy, so your energy goes into the design and delivery that makes that strategy real.

Key Responsibilities
Partner on the hard questions: Act as a genuine thought partner to the Head of People and functional leaders on org design, team health, and how we grow capability as we scale. Bring a point of view, back it with evidence, and pressure-test the easy answer

Run the diagnostics: Design and field the research that tells us what is actually happening in the org on manager effectiveness, engagement, retention drivers, team health. Turn the data into a clear read and a recommended intervention

Build manager enablement: Design and deliver the enablement that turns our managers into strong people leaders including onboarding for new managers, coaching skills, the hard-conversation playbook. Build for adoption, then measure whether adoption happened

Grow our ICs: Activate our career ladders in the day-to-day. Build the development frameworks, growth conversations, and learning paths that make progression feel real and earned rather than a document people check a box against

Lead change: Own the change management behind org-wide shifts new frameworks, new ways of working, new structures. Bring the method, build the coalition, and see it through the messy middle

Ship, not just recommend: Own interventions end to end. Design them, build them, run them, and live with the results. Iterate on what the data tells you

Who You Are
Applied grounding: You have done research and interventions inside a real business and owned them through adoption, not studied an org from the outside or delivered a project and left before the outcome was known. You can walk us through an intervention you owned end to end, how you measured whether it worked, and one that did not work and what you learned

Diagnostic rigor: You know how to design a real diagnostic and read the results honestly. A social sciences PhD (I/O psychology, organizational behavior, organizational sociology, or similar) is a highly preferred. You apply evidence based practices

Builder and trainer: You have built enablement and development programs that people actually used, and you can stand in a room and move a group of managers. Bring examples with adoption data attached

Change practitioner: You have run change inside a company as the internal owner by building coalition, absorbing friction, and staying through the part where it gets hard

AI fluency: You use AI every day and can translate that fluency into how you research, build, and deliver. At Distyl this is the baseline, not a bonus

Peer-level judgment: You operate as a thought partner to leaders. You can hold your own in a hard conversation, disagree well, and know when to bring rigor and when to move