HR (People) M&A Lead

As an HR (People) M&A Lead at Payward, you own the people side of M&A activity end to end, from first-pass diligence through close and integration. Reporting directly to the Chief People Officer, you operate in a high-pace, high-volume environment, moving fast through messy data rooms while making critical risk calls with incomplete information. This role requires an in-house operator with an analyst's mindset who can use AI to accelerate review cycles, but whose real edge is judgment about what risks matter and when to deviate.

What you'll do

• Own the people's workstream of Payward's M&A activity end to end, from first-pass diligence through close and integration.
• Build and own the People due diligence questionnaire (DDQ), including data requests, follow-up questions to targets, and deeper-dive workshops.
• Process high-volume, low-structure data rooms (employment contracts, org data, compensation and equity files, policies, claims history) using AI and automation to compress review cycles.
• Translate hundreds of findings into a prioritized list of flags scored against Payward's risk tolerance, with a clear recommendation attached to each.
• Lead the drafting of people-side deal mechanics: compensation modelling, equity treatment, retention and earn-out structures, and deal-specific considerations that hold up in negotiation with founders.
• Sit in the room with corp dev, legal, finance and People leadership to leverage subject-matter experts and defend recommendations with data.
• Act as People M&A program manager during integration after signing, supporting org design, levelling and compensation harmonization, retention execution, and Day 1 people readiness.
• Turn each deal into reusable infrastructure and learnings by building playbooks, DDQ templates, risk scoring, and automation that accelerate future deals.

What you bring

• 8+ years across M&A people/HR diligence, integration, total rewards, or corporate development, with hands-on ownership of the people workstream on completed deals.
• A track record running multiple diligence processes in parallel to hard timelines, knowing what to prioritize or defer.
• Strong analytical depth comfortable modelling compensation, equity, dilution, retention cost and integration spend directly, not delegating the analysis.
• Global and cross-border deal experience with multi-jurisdiction and regulatory change of control employment considerations.
• Demonstrated use of AI and automation to review large document volumes, with judgment about where the model's output can and cannot be trusted.
• Ability to make and communicate risk calls on incomplete information and state a position clearly to executive stakeholders.
• Credibility in founder-facing negotiation conversations on compensation, equity and retention structures.
• Rigorous confidentiality instincts and comfort operating on live, undisclosed transactions.
• High agency in ambiguity, thriving when deals move, scope shifts, and no one hands over a finished process.

Nice to have

• Crypto, fintech or regulated financial services acquisition experience.
• Experience integrating founder-led or early-stage teams into a larger platform.
• Prior work building a diligence or integration playbook from scratch.

About Payward

Payward is the parent company behind Kraken, one of the world's longest-standing crypto platforms trusted by over 10 million individuals and institutions. Payward has spent 15 years building a modern, globally accessible financial infrastructure platform offering spot trading, margin, futures, staking, and OTC services, alongside products and companies including NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services and CF Benchmarks.