Senior Manager/Director - People & Culture

Senior Manager / Director – People & Culture
Uni Seoul | Pune (On-site, flexible hours)
WANTED: A CHIEF HAPPINESS ARCHITECT (the official title is less fun)
We sell joy in 1,000+ tiny, adorable forms. Now we need someone to build the same joy inside the company, for the people who make the magic happen in our stores and at HQ.
If you believe great culture is designed, not decorated, and that a watertight payroll is a love language, keep reading. This one's for you.
ROLE SNAPSHOT
- Role: Senior Manager / Director – People & Culture
- Location: Pune Corporate HQ (on-site, with flexible hours)
- Reports to: The Founders — directly
- Scope: Corporate HQ + retail teams across 8 cities and growing
- Experience: 8+ years in HR, 3+ years leading HR end to end
- Level: Senior Manager or Director, based on depth of experience
MEET UNI SEOUL: CUTENESS AS A WAY OF LIVING
Uni Seoul is India's Korean-inspired impulse lifestyle brand. Founded in Pune in 2023, we've grown into 17+ stores across 8 cities in under three years.
Walk into one of our stores and you'll find plushies waiting to be adopted, a walk-in plushie closet, and shelves of quirky stationery, beauty and home finds. Everything is designed in-house and priced between ₹99 and ₹2,999.
What we've built so far:
- 17+ stores across Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Nashik, Ahmedabad, Kochi and Chennai
- ₹60 Cr ARR, on track to close the year at ₹100 Cr
- NPS above 80 and 4.7+ Google ratings — customers don't just shop, they come back
- ₹35 Cr Series A (June 2026), led by Riverwalk Holdings and Sauce.vc, with Panthera Peak Ventures and MIXI Global Investments
- An online store at uniseoul.in and a growing loyalty community
THE PLAYGROUND WE OPERATE IN
India's young consumers are buying small joys, often and on impulse. A ₹450 plushie, a pastel planner, a K-beauty find, these are everyday treats, not big-ticket decisions.
Three forces are powering this category:
- The K-wave is mainstream. K-dramas, K-pop and K-beauty have made Korean aesthetics part of everyday Gen Z and millennial life.
- Stores are experiences again. Shoppers want places that are fun to walk into, photograph and share not just shelves.
- Global players have proven the model. Miniso, Daiso, Pop Mart and Artbox show how big this can get. We're building the homegrown, design-led version for India.
Retail is a people business. Every store's magic depends on the team on the floor — which is exactly why this role matters so much.
WHERE WE'RE HEADED
Our ambition is 500 stores across India, followed by the UAE and Southeast Asia through master franchises. In the near term, 18 new stores are already in the pipeline.
That means hundreds of new team members, new cities, new store leaders and a Corporate HQ that has to scale without losing its soul. The person in this role will decide what kind of company we become on the way there.
YOUR MISSION
Build Uni Seoul into the place where India's best retail and lifestyle talent wants to work — and make sure every rule, rupee and record behind it is rock solid.
You'll be the founders' thought partner on everything people, and the person every employee trusts to be fair. Half architect, half guardian, full-time culture keeper.
WHAT YOU'LL OWN
1. Talent: find them, win them, welcome them
- Own hiring for HQ and senior store roles, and build the playbook for fast, high-volume store hiring as we open new cities.
- Build our employer brand so great people come looking for us.
- Design an onboarding experience so good that Day 1 feels like walking into one of our stores.
2. Culture & engagement: make joy an operating system
- Turn our values into everyday habits - rituals, recognition and celebrations people actually look forward to.
- Run pulse checks, listen hard, and fix what you hear.
- Keep HQ and the store floor feeling like one team, not two companies.
3. Learning & growth: grow people as fast as we grow stores
- Build training for store teams, store managers and cluster leaders, plus leadership programmes for HQ.
- Create clear career paths so a store associate can see a road to store manager and beyond.
- Own succession planning so every new store opens with a ready leader.
4. Performance & rewards: make growth fair and visible
- Run goal-setting, KRAs/KPIs and the annual appraisal cycle end to end.
- Own salary benchmarking, incentive design for stores, and support the ESOP programme.
5. HR operations & compliance: the foundation nobody sees until it cracks
- Own payroll and statutory compliance across every state we operate in: PF, ESIC, gratuity, professional tax, LWF, minimum wages and Shops & Establishments registrations.
- Build policies, SOPs and HR systems that scale from 17 stores to 500.
- Stay ahead of labour law changes, including the new Labour Codes, and keep us audit-ready at all times.
- Work with our legal counsel on audits, notices and disputes.
6. Employee relations, POSH & inclusion: be the person people trust
- Be the go-to advisor on grievances, ethics and conduct; handle disciplinary matters fairly and by the book.
- Run the POSH framework and Internal Committee, and train teams across locations.
- Champion diversity and inclusion so every store looks like the communities it serves.
And you'll build the team. You'll lead our HR Business Partner and grow a People & Culture function that can support 500 stores.
YOUR FIRST YEAR, AT A GLANCE
- First 30 days: Visit stores, meet every HQ team, sit with the founders. Complete a full people and compliance health check.
- By day 60: A clear People & Culture roadmap agreed with the founders. Statutory compliance fully in order across every state.
- By day 90: Core policies, onboarding and a store hiring playbook live. First engagement pulse survey done.
- By month 12: Hiring keeps pace with every store launch. Store attrition trending down. A career ladder and leadership pipeline in place. Clean audits.
How we'll measure you: time to hire and time to open a fully staffed store, early attrition, engagement scores, internal promotions, and zero compliance gaps.
WHO YOU ARE
Must-haves:
- 8+ years in HR, with at least 3 years leading the HR function end to end (Senior Manager); 12+ years for Director.
- Hands-on command of Indian labour law: Shops & Establishments Acts, Payment of Wages, Minimum Wages, PF, ESIC, Gratuity, Bonus, POSH and the new Labour Codes.
- Experience running multi-state payroll and compliance for a distributed workforce.
- A degree in HR, Law, Organisational Psychology or a related field (an MBA/PGDM in HR is a plus).
- You're a builder. You've set up systems from scratch, not just maintained them.
Bonus points:
- You've worked in retail, QSR, D2C or consumer brands with a large frontline workforce.
- You've scaled a team through rapid store or city expansion.
- You've worked closely with founders at a funded startup.
- You use data and HR tech (HRMS, ATS, dashboards) to make decisions.
The vibe we're looking for:
- Warm enough to be trusted, firm enough to be respected.
- Calm in a crisis, curious about people, allergic to bureaucracy.
- As comfortable on a store floor as in a boardroom.
WHY YOU'LL LOVE IT HERE
- Work directly with the founders. No layers, no waiting for approvals from someone three floors up. Your ideas go from whiteboard to rollout in weeks.
- A true open-door HQ. Anyone can walk up to anyone, founders included. Good ideas win, whoever they come from.
- Flexible working hours. We care about outcomes, not attendance registers. Plan your day around your best work.
- Build, don't babysit. This is a blank canvas. The function you design will support 500 stores.
- Learn at startup speed. You'll see retail, expansion, fundraising and brand-building up close. Few roles teach this much this fast.
- Grow as we grow. As the company scales, so does your team, your scope and your title.
- Competitive pay and wealth creation. Strong compensation, plus eligibility for our ESOP programme.
- The cutest perks in India. Employee discounts on everything in our stores. Yes, including the plushies.
- A team that actually has fun. Launch parties, store openings, festivals and celebrations are part of the job description.
THINK YOU'RE THE ONE? PROVE IT (WITH STYLE)
Write directly to Mohit - mohit@uniseoul.in with the subject line "Application for Senior Manager / Director – People & Culture", attach your CV, and tell us:
1. Why you? In 150 words or less, why should we hand you the keys to our culture?
2. Your HR war story. The hardest people situation you've handled, and what you'd do differently now. Humour is welcome; wisdom is essential.
3. Your first 90 days. One thing you'd fix and one thing you'd build first at a fast-growing retail brand.
Consider this your first test. If your email makes us smile, you're halfway there. If

Work arrangement
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