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.