Talent Acquisition Manager

This function needs an owner who can step in, steady what's in flight, and then build it properly. This is a build-and-run role, with strategy coming later. You'll carry a live req load yourself from week one, writing the outreach, running the screens, and closing the offers, while designing the hiring engine that makes the next fifty hires repeatable. You'll start solo, with agencies and sourcing partners for extra capacity, and build a team underneath you as volume justifies it. You decide when that is and make the case for it. You'll report to our People Leader and partner closely with our People Operations Manager and Office Manager. This role suits someone who's genuinely energized by ambiguity, who'd rather diagnose a messy pipeline and rebuild it than inherit a polished process and maintain it. We're a lean team in a fast-evolving company, so the scope of this role will keep expanding alongside it; this description is a starting point, not a ceiling. This role is located in our SF office and has the opportunity for hybrid work from home with a minimum of three days a week in the office.

Responsibilities

• Own full-cycle recruiting for technical and strategic non-technical roles, sourcing through close, carrying a meaningful req load personally rather than delegating it outward.
• Partner with hiring managers to define role requirements, success criteria, and ideal candidate profiles, and hold the line on the bar when a search gets painful.
• Build the hiring engine: repeatable sourcing motions, structured interview loops, scorecards, debrief norms, and closing strategies that survive your absence.
• Own and evolve the recruiting stack (currently Ashby), including data integrity, reporting, and periodically assessing whether the tooling still fits.
• Manage agency and sourcing partner relationships and the budget behind them, including deciding when we don't need them.
• Own the candidate experience from first outreach through offer acceptance, ensuring timely communication and a process that reflects well on us whether or not someone gets hired.
• Develop our talent brand through content, events, communities, and candidate touchpoints, measured by pipeline rather than impressions.
• Use data to run the function: pipeline health, conversion by stage, time-to-fill, and source effectiveness. Build just enough reporting to operate proactively rather than reactively.
• Scope and build the talent team as hiring volume demands it, making the case for headcount, hiring sourcers or coordinators, and managing them well.

You may be a good fit if you have:

• 8+ years of full-cycle recruiting experience, including time at a high-growth startup, a talent-dense engineering organization, or a top-tier search firm
• A proven track record closing hard-to-fill technical roles. You can hold your own in a conversation with an infrastructure or systems engineer, and you know when a candidate is bluffing
• Experience owning a recruiting function, not just a req list: ATS ownership, process design, reporting, and agency management
  
  • Have built and managed a small talent team: sourcers, coordinators, or recruiters
• Comfort operating at both altitudes, advising a hiring manager on comp strategy one hour and writing sourcing outreach the next. No part of the work is beneath you
• The ability to sell the vision: you can distill a complex technical problem into a pitch that a great candidate wants to hear
• Real conviction about talent quality and culture add rather than hitting a number, and the judgment to know when a "no" is worth the delay
• Fluency with modern recruiting tooling (Ashby, LinkedIn Recruiter, Gem/Juicebox, Slack, Notion) and comfort using data to spot problems before they become misses

Strong candidates may also:

• Have been the founding or first recruiter at a Series A to C AI, deep tech, or infrastructure company
• Have run employer brand work that measurably moved inbound pipeline, not just visibility
• Have hired across both technical and non-technical functions (engineering, GTM, ops, G&A)
• Have hands-on experience with Ashby specifically

A Note on Growth Mindset

The person who thrives here won't have done this exact job before, because at this stage this exact job doesn't really exist yet anywhere else. It's a founding recruiter's workload with a functional leader's scope, in a company whose hiring bar is the thing everything else depends on. What matters more than a perfect resume match is whether you're the kind of person who gets energy from an undefined problem, builds the plane while flying it responsibly, and treats "I don't know yet, but here's how I'll find out" as a completely acceptable answer in week one. If you read this and thought "I can figure that out" rather than "I'd need a playbook first," that's the signal we're looking for.
Benefits

Generous equity grant

Team members are offered a competitive salary along with equity in the company

Visa Sponsorships

Yes, we sponsor visas and work permits

Retirement matching

We match 401(k) plans up to 4%

Medical, dental & vision

We offer competitive medical, dental, vision insurance for employees and dependents and cover 100% of premiums

Time off

We offer unlimited paid time off as well as 10+ observed holidays

Parental leave

We offer biological, adoptive, and foster parents paid time off to spend quality time with family

Daily lunch

We cover lunch daily for employees

Unlimited office book budget

You can buy as many books for the office as you want