Senior HR Business Partner, Employee Relations Specialist - EMEA & APAC.

Who is Sonar?

Sonar enables organizations to ship agentic code with confidence. Code creation is abundant, but confidence is scarce. Our core platform, SonarQube, verifies over 750 billion lines of code every day, delivering agentic verification and governance for all code. Trusted by more than 7 million developers and 75% of the Fortune 100, including teams at Nvidia, ServiceNow, Booking.com, Goldman Sachs, AstraZeneca, and Ford Motor Company, Sonar enables organizations to reduce outages, improve security, and lower the cost and risk of agentic software development.

Founded in Geneva and now headquartered in Austin, Texas, Sonar has a global team working across offices and hubs, including Silicon Valley, London, Bochum, Barcelona, Singapore, Tokyo, and the Washington, D.C. area. At Sonar, we’re enabling enterprises to build agentic software factories that can move quickly while maintaining the control, consistency and evidence required to ship with confidence. 

Position description

Sonar’s EMEA and APAC footprint spans multiple legal jurisdictions, employment frameworks, and cultural contexts, from London to Geneva to Singapore. This role exists to give that population two things at once: a trusted HRBP who understands the business and the region, and a specialist who owns employee relations with the rigor and consistency a scaling, multi-jurisdiction company needs.

You will carry a dual mandate. As HRBP, you will be the day-to-day partner for leaders across EMEA and APAC, helping them make sound performance decisions and be a trusted partner to the business and its leaders. As the region’s Employee Relations specialist, you will own case management, investigations, and workplace practice end-to-end, working daily alongside our Head of Employment Law (based in Austin) to make sure every case is handled compliantly, consistently, and compassionately.

Your impact will show up in two ways: HRBP outcomes (org health, manager capability, retention) for the leaders you support, and ER outcomes (case volume, time-to-resolution, consistency of practice, and legal risk reduction) across the region.

What you will do

As strategic HRBP for leaders across EMEA (Germany, UK, France, Switzerland) and APAC (Singapore, Japan), advising on org design, workforce planning, performance, and team dynamics with data and a point of view, not just a summary.

Use the HRBP people dashboard and org health data to prepare insights for leadership and manager 1:1s, flagging risks and decisions before they become urgent.

Support integration and engagement of new EMEA/APAC hires, partnering with Recruiting and People Ops on time-to-productivity and onboarding quality.

Translate global People strategy (career frameworks, calibration, internal mobility, compensation philosophy) into guidance that works across EMEA and APAC’s different regulatory and cultural contexts.

Employee Relations & Workplace Practices 

Own employee relations cases end-to-end across EMEA and APAC. Performance, conduct, grievance, and exit cases — from intake through resolution.

Lead workplace investigations with rigor and discretion, producing findings and recommendations that hold up to scrutiny.

Partner daily with the Head of Employment Law (Austin) on complex or high-risk cases, ensuring practice stays aligned with employment law across every jurisdiction you cover.

Build and maintain the region’s ER case management framework, investigation protocols, and workplace policies, keeping them current as regulation evolves (UK, EU, and APAC employment law; EU AI Act and GDPR implications for People decisions).

Train and coach managers on early intervention and proactive feedback, working to reduce ER case volume over time, not just close what lands on your desk.

Report on ER metrics, case volume, time-to-close, and risk exposure,  to give leadership a clear, data-backed view of workplace health across the region.

Experience and qualifications

• 7+ years combining HR Business Partner work with employee relations case management or workplace investigations, ideally across multiple jurisdictions.

• Direct experience partnering with in-house or external employment law counsel on complex, high-stakes cases.

• Experience supporting EMEA and/or APAC populations, comfortable with the added complexity of multiple legal systems and cultural norms in one remit.

• Experience in a high-growth technology company where pace is fast and ambiguity is normal.

• Solid grounding in UK and EU employment law fundamentals, with working familiarity with APAC frameworks (or a fast learner’s ability to build it)

• Proven experience leading formal workplace investigations, from intake and evidence-gathering to written findings.

• Comfortable with HRIS platforms (BambooHR or equivalent) and building your own data-driven narratives without relying on an analyst.

• Familiar with, or actively curious about, AI tools in the HR workflow (Glean, Claude, or similar), with the judgment to evaluate outputs critically and own the final call.

How you show up

• Discreet and trusted: people bring you sensitive situations because you handle them with judgment, confidentiality, and consistency.

• Direct communicator: you bring leaders clear choices and a recommendation, not an escalation without a point of view.

• Courageous: you hold the line on fairness and doing the right thing, especially when a case is uncomfortable.

• Structured under pressure: investigations and ER cases don’t wait for a good day, you stay organised and even-handed when things get tense.