Founding Talent Lead

This is not a recruiting coordinator or traditional HRBP role. It is a company-building role.

As the company's first dedicated Talent Lead, you will own recruiting end-to-end while helping define how the organization scales. You will work closely with leadership to build workforce strategy, establish hiring processes, create talent pipelines, and ensure every hire strengthens the organization's capabilities and culture.

You will partner closely with leaders across the organization to optimize onboarding, improve time to impact, and ensure new team members are positioned for success.

Many of the people the company needs will not be actively looking. They may be working in advanced technology organizations, research institutions, highly regulated industries, engineering firms, or high-growth technology companies. Finding, engaging, and closing this talent will be a core part of the role.

• Lead full-cycle recruiting across technical, product, and business operations roles.

• Develop sourcing strategies for difficult-to-access talent markets.

• Build target-company maps and long-term talent pipelines.

• Conduct candidate outreach, screening, interview management, references, offers, and closing.

• Develop compelling recruiting narratives that reflect the company's mission, opportunity, and ambition.

• Partner with executives and leaders to define hiring requirements before searches begin.

• Recruit across engineering, software, systems, research, product, operations, and other specialized disciplines.

• Help evaluate talent through structured interview processes and hiring calibration.

• Guide compensation and closing conversations for highly sought-after candidates.

• Implement scalable recruiting processes, tools, and metrics.

• Own recruiting analytics, forecasting, and reporting.

• Establish interview best practices, scorecards, and hiring governance.

• Improve candidate experience and employer brand.

• Build the recruiting foundation that future talent team members will inherit.

• Work with leadership on headcount planning and organizational design.

• Advise on talent market dynamics, compensation trends, and hiring risks.

• Help determine when problems should be solved through hiring, automation, partnerships, or organizational design.

• Serve as a trusted partner to senior leaders as the company scales.

• Partner with leadership on onboarding, employee experience, and organizational development initiatives.

• Support workforce planning, headcount forecasting, and talent analytics.

• Help introduce scalable practices around performance, career growth, and team effectiveness.

• Contribute to building a high-performance culture as the company scales.

• Build a comprehensive talent map for the organization's highest-priority hiring needs.

• Establish recruiting metrics, process rigor, and hiring cadence.

• Take ownership of active recruiting searches.

• Develop trusted relationships with hiring managers and senior leaders.

• Launch a scalable recruiting operating framework.

• Evaluate and strengthen onboarding processes to improve new hire ramp-up and integration.

• Establish foundational people metrics and reporting, including headcount, hiring progress, and retention insights.

• Deliver against key hiring priorities while maintaining a high talent bar.

• Build repeatable processes across sourcing, assessment, interviewing, and closing.

• Improve hiring predictability, speed, and candidate experience.

• Establish the company as a destination employer for highly skilled, mission-driven talent.

• Create the foundation for scaling the talent function as the organization grows.

• Partner with leadership to introduce foundational practices for performance feedback, career development, and talent planning.

• Develop employee engagement and retention initiatives that support a high-performance culture as the team scales.