Founding Talent Lead

What You’ll Build

• A repeatable, high-precision hiring engine across technical and non-technical roles, including sourcing playbooks, structured interview processes, scorecards, and calibration standards.
• A modern recruiting stack, including configuring, optimizing, and instrumenting Ashby and AI-powered sourcing tools so the funnel is fast, measurable, and high-quality.
• Hiring manager enablement across engineering, product, GTM, and leadership, helping teams define roles clearly, calibrate quickly, and run consistent, high-signal interview loops.
• An employer brand and candidate experience that reflect who we are and help us convert exceptional passive talent.
• A data-driven hiring operating rhythm, including pipeline metrics, conversion rates, time-to-fill, source effectiveness, and the leadership cadence to act on what the data shows.

What You’ll Own

• Full-cycle recruiting for our most critical and specialized roles, from search strategy through close.
• Company-wide hiring strategy and capacity planning in partnership with founders and leadership, translating roadmap and headcount needs into an executable hiring plan.
• Hiring quality and consistency across the company. You’ll be the steward of the bar and the person who helps teams make better hiring decisions.
• Build-vs-buy decisions on agencies and external partners, including when to scale support up or down, how to manage budgets, and how to hold partners accountable.
• Responsible use of AI in recruiting. You know AI can expand reach and speed, but judgment, calibration, and candidate quality matter more than volume. You’ll set the standard for how we use AI tools without letting automation run unchecked.

What We’re Looking For

• 7+ years of full-cycle recruiting experience, ideally as an early or founding recruiter at a high-growth startup.
• A strong track record hiring niche technical talent across AI/ML, infrastructure, platform engineering, or developer tools.
• Experience building recruiting infrastructure from scratch: sourcing systems, interview loops, scorecards, calibration rituals, and hiring metrics.
• Strong talent judgment, with the ability to deliver high-precision slates and reduce calibration cycles with hiring managers.
• Comfort operating across functions, from technical hiring to GTM, marketing, and operations roles.
• Fluency with modern sourcing and AI recruiting tools, with strong judgment around quality, signal, and automation.
• High ownership, grit, and communication skills with founders, hiring managers, candidates, and external partners.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with AI/ML, open-source developer communities, developer tools, or agency/vendor management.