People Operations Specialist - Guiding Leadership Growth and Systemic Reform at San Quentin Skunkworks

San Quentin SkunkWorks is an incarcerated-led innovation lab that designs and tests justice reform from the inside. We partner with the Governor's Office, world-renowned artists like eL Seed and FaithXLVII, UC researchers, and senior professionals across policy, tech, and culture. Our work has been covered on the front page of the LA Times and profiled by CalMatters as a model for system-wide transformation.

We now have roughly 60 volunteers, active institutional partnerships, and programs that are drawing national attention. What we don't yet have is the HR infrastructure to match. We're scaling and that transition requires real systems that meet the importance of this work.

Your Role: What you'll build:

Repeatable systems for how volunteers are brought in, supported, and transitioned across the organization.

Our current focus is volunteer lifecycle processes, role descriptions, and the structural documentation that the organization currently runs without.

How Collaboration Works

You'll report to and work closely with our Head of People and collaborate directly with incarcerated leadership at San Quentin through weekly or biweekly meetings, (in person or over the phone) and occasionally with the Volunteer VP of Operations on organizational design decisions.

Most work is asynchronous — clear briefs, shared documents, structured review cycles. We use Monday.com to track projects and deadlines.

What We're Looking For

5+ years in people operations, HR, or organizational design — ideally in a scaling nonprofit, startup, or mission-driven organization

Direct experience building HR systems from scratch or during a growth transition (volunteer-to-staff, startup-to-scale, pre-to-post-funding)

Strong documentation instincts — you build things that other people can run without you

Experience with Monday.com or similar project management tools

Helpful but not required:

Background in restorative justice, education reform, or criminal justice environments

Experience supporting organizations through their first hires

The Impact

If you join us, you will be building the operational backbone that lets an incarcerated-led organization make its first hires. The systems you create will shape how SkunkWorks grows, who it can bring on, and whether the infrastructure holds as the work as it scales.