Founding People & Talent Lead

ABOUT THE ROLE This is a founding, high-impact role building the Talent and People function from the ground up at a fast-growing, Y Combinator–backed AI startup in Munich. You'll own end-to-end recruiting while laying the foundations for how the company onboards, develops, and retains exceptional people — working directly alongside the founding team to remove the single largest bottleneck to scaling. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Build and own the full hiring engine, leading recruiting end-to-end from role definition through to offer close. - Spend the majority of your early time on talent acquisition, sourcing and closing exceptional candidates across all functions. - Design and scale recruiting processes, analytics, workflows, and operating rhythms that enable fast, high-quality hiring. - Partner with founders and team leads to define role expectations, calibrate hiring decisions, and challenge org design. - Shape People systems over time, including onboarding, performance calibration, career progression, and compensation benchmarking. - Develop and grow the company's employer brand to attract top talent across the DACH region and beyond. - Build and nurture a talent network spanning universities, startups, and technical communities. - Leverage AI tools and experiment with new workflows to increase recruiting velocity and quality. - Uphold and protect a high bar for hiring quality as the organisation scales. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 2–5 years of experience in Talent, People, or org development, with meaningful time at a high-growth startup or scaleup. - Proven ability to run hands-on, end-to-end recruiting (role scoping, sourcing, assessment, closing) while building scalable systems and processes. - Experience operating in hypergrowth contexts — e.g. helping a team grow from 10 to 50 or 30 to 100 people. - Strong storytelling and relationship-building skills with a track record of sourcing and closing senior or hard-to-reach candidates. - Structured thinker who can design systems independently and iterate quickly. - Daily user of AI tools with a genuine curiosity to experiment with new recruiting workflows. - Ability to build employer brand presence and a talent pipeline in the DACH region and beyond. - Fluency in English; German language skills are a plus. - Experience with performance calibration and compensation benchmarking is a nice-to-have. - Comfortable with ambiguity, high agency, and growing into a broader People leadership role over time. LOCATION On-site in Munich, Germany. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.