About The Role

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.