Founding Technical Recruiter

This is the most important hire we are making ahead of hypergrowth. We have the customers and the product. The constraint on the next year is how many great engineers we can get into the building, and you are the person who removes it.

You are our first in-house recruiter. You report to our CTO and sit next to him. Our VP of Growth and BizOps, who owns people, runs the weekly funnel review with you and makes every offer. The mandate is ten engineers in Los Angeles in the next six months, then the next twenty people across research, go-to-market, design and finance. Every engineer works in person in West Los Angeles, five days a week, and most of the ones we want do not live here yet. Part of this job is bringing them here.

We are not necessarily hiring a recruiter with a network. We are hiring a recruiter who runs a search the way a growth team runs a funnel: a pool measured in thousands, scored before the CTO sees it, outreach tested daily, every stage timed, and a Monday dashboard that says where the candidates are and what each of our constraints costs us.

In one week you might calibrate the rubric with the CTO against the last ten people he said yes and no to, source and enrich three hundred engineers in San Francisco and at the top computer science programs, test two outreach variants and kill the loser by Wednesday, run eight phone screens, move three to the programming screen, chase every open next step in the ATS, and prep the founders for two closing calls.

What you will own in your first 90 days

• The rubric. Our CTO knows a great engineer when he sees one and will tell you the bar is hard to write down. You write it down with him, test it against his past decisions, and make it the score every profile carries before he sees it.
• The pool. A sourced, enriched and scored base of engineers who are in Los Angeles or would move here, drawn from San Francisco and NYC, the top computer science programs and the places strong early-career engineers actually are: hackathon results, open-source contributors, YC's hiring lists, the group chats. Thousands, not hundreds, refreshed weekly.
• Outreach. Personalized at scale from a real mailbox, measured daily: sent, opened, replied, booked. Variants tested, losers killed, winners written down.
• The phone screen. You run it. Can they name exactly which model and effort level they code with. What do they read to keep up. Can they explain their work without rambling. You pass the ones who clear it to the programming screen and tell the CTO why.
• The process. Every candidate with a next step and a date, interviews scheduled within 48 hours of a yes, candidates told where they stand. Speed is a feature. We lose people without it.
• The close. The founders sell and sign. You set them up: the candidate's situation, what they care about, the relocation package and the comp conversation ready before the call.
• The dashboard. One page the founders read every Monday: pool size, touches, replies, screens, onsites, offers, accepts, and days at each stage.

The bar is quantitative

We will ask for four things

• Your funnel. From a search you ran: sourced, contacted, reply rate, screens, onsites, offers, accepts, time to fill. If you cannot produce it, you did not own it.
• Your tooling. Something you built, not a default you used. A scripted enrichment, a scoring sheet, an outreach experiment with a result. Gem and LinkedIn Recruiter are table stakes, not the bar.
• Your model. Which AI model and effort level you use for what, and why. "I use Claude to draft emails" is the wrong answer here, the same as it is for the engineers you will recruit.
• Your work sample. Every finalist does the same one, whatever their background.

Where it goes

Engineering first, then everyone. Once the engine runs for engineers you own the hiring plan, and the person who does this well ends up running talent at a company several times this size. We are a meritocracy. Scope follows judgment, not tenure, and we do not see a ceiling on this role.