People Systems & Operations Specialist - 12 month contract

About Lyka:

Lyka was founded in 2018 by Anna Podolsky, inspired by her dog, Lyka, who was suffering from chronic health issues despite being on “premium” kibble. Together with Gabriel Guedes (COO) and Dr. Matthew Muir (Integrative Veterinarian), they built Lyka from the ground up with one core belief: better food can radically improve a pet’s healthspan and quality of life.

Lyka’s meals are vet-formulated and gently cooked from real food ingredients. Delivered via a flexible subscription model, Lyka meals have driven remarkable improvements for tens of thousands of customers, supporting gut health, reducing intolerances, improving energy and mobility, and even promoting hair growth.

What began as home-cooked meals has since scaled into one of Australia’s fastest-growing consumer companies, a vertically integrated, tech-enabled brand that is transforming pet health nationwide.

Lyka now operates from two offices, Sydney (HQ) and Melbourne, with three state-of-the-art food production facilities (two in Sydney, one in Melbourne) and a growing national footprint.

At Lyka, we’re not just selling pet food, we’re pioneering a new standard of wellness for pets. With strong product-market fit, deep customer love, and a track record of rapid growth, we’re now entering our most ambitious chapter yet: building a generational brand and category-defining business with global impact.

About the role:

Lyka is on a mission to transform the health of dogs everywhere, and behind every great mission is a great team, at Lyka, we call it the Pack. We're looking for a People Systems & Operations Specialist to be the beating heart of that experience: the person who makes sure every process, every system and every interaction feels as considered as the food we make.

This is a role for someone who genuinely loves the mechanics of great People Operations. You'll be the first point of contact for managers and the Pack when they have questions about policy, pay, leave or process, and you'll own the employee lifecycle end-to-end, from the moment someone joins, through every change along the way, to the day they eventually move on. You'll be trusted to know when something needs your judgement and when it needs someone else's, and you'll bring precision to everything you touch.

What you will do:

You'll become the resident expert on our People systems, Rippling included, and you'll be the person the team turns to when data needs cleaning up, timesheets need sorting, or a system just isn't behaving. Documentation will be your quiet superpower, you'll keep our SOPs and workflows sharp, consistent and easy to follow, so that as we scale, our processes scale with us rather than becoming a bottleneck.

Reporting will be a regular rhythm of the role: pulling together accurate, timely People data and knowing how to read it, so you can flag trends and insights before they become problems. You'll partner closely with the People Operations Manager and the wider People team on the cyclical moments that matter most, performance reviews, engagement surveys and the like, bringing the kind of reliability that means nothing falls through the cracks. Beyond the day-to-day, you'll get to sink your teeth into People Ops projects from start to finish, applying real project management chops to initiatives that improve how we work. And because the employee lifecycle touches more than just People, you'll build strong working relationships with Payroll, Finance and Legal to keep everything moving smoothly.

What we are looking for:

We're after someone with experience in a People Ops, HR Ops or HRIS-focused role who thrives in a fast-paced, high-growth environment, though we know great skills transfer, so a background in Business Operations or Data & Analytics could be just as strong a fit. Hands-on experience owning and administering an HRIS is essential, Rippling experience especially so, including configuration, troubleshooting and keeping data honest. You'll already have a reputation as the go-to person for systems and data wherever you've worked.

Attention to detail isn't a nice-to-have here, it's core to how you operate, you're process-driven, organised and have a strong bias to action, with an instinct for noticing when something looks off and following it all the way through to resolution. You're comfortable moving across a broad systems stack beyond just Rippling, think Notion, Slack, Microsoft, and you pick up new tools quickly enough to help others navigate them too. Strong written communication is a must: you can turn a messy process into a clean SOP, and a tricky message into something warm, simple and easy to act on. You're confident working with data in Excel.

• Work in a fast-growing start-up, experiencing what goes on behind the scenes to sustain hyper-growth for a start-up with a physical product!
• Growth and Development – Lyka is growing extremely quickly, which means you will have the opportunity to experience different challenges every day and progressively acquire more responsibilities as our facility and team expand. We provide an annual L&D budget for you to continue your personal development.
• Work for a sustainability-focused company – we care about the health of our dogs and our planet. We’re proud to be Australia’s only carbon-negative and plastic-negative pet wellness company and we’re always looking at ways for us to improve sustainability practices.
• Be part of a diverse top-talent team, coming from widely different backgrounds and geographies.
• Up to 18 weeks of paid parental leave top-up
• Wellbeing assistance and tools to take care of your mental and physical wellbeing so you can do your best work
• Pupper parent support to care for your furry friends – flexible arrangements for new pets, pet-friendly offices, discounts, and financial allowance for dog training and care to help them live their best life!

We are committed to building inclusive and diverse teams

Lyka is an equal-opportunity employer devoted to providing a working environment that embraces and values diversity and inclusion. We celebrate diversity, are devoted to creating an inclusive environment for all staff and encourage people of all backgrounds to apply. If you have any support or access requirements, we encourage you to advise us at the time of application.