Founding People & Talent Lead

About the Role

This is a founding, hands-on role responsible for building the Talent and People function from the ground up at a fast-growing AI startup in the enterprise sales automation space. You will own end-to-end recruiting while also shaping how the team is onboarded, developed, and retained as the company scales. Working directly with the founders, you will be solving the single largest bottleneck for a high-growth team operating in a large, underserved market.

What You'll Do

• Build and own the full hiring engine, leading recruiting end-to-end from role definition through to offers.

• Dedicate the majority of your early time to 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.

• Build out People systems over time, including onboarding, performance calibration, career progression, and compensation benchmarking.

• Develop and own the employer brand to attract top talent across the DACH region and beyond.

• Build and nurture a network across universities, startups, and technical communities to grow the talent pipeline.

• Use AI tools and experiment with new workflows to increase recruiting velocity and quality.

• Maintain a high hiring bar and implement measures to uphold standards as the company scales.

• Contribute actively to company culture with a focus on long-term retention and team development.

What We're Looking For

• 2 to 5 years of experience spanning talent acquisition and broader people topics such as performance or org development.

• Hands-on experience at a hypergrowth startup, for example scaling a team from 10 to 50 or 30 to 100 employees.

• Demonstrated ability to run end-to-end recruiting while designing scalable systems and processes in parallel.

• Strong storytelling and relationship-building skills, with a track record of sourcing and closing senior candidates.

• Comfort with ambiguity, high agency, and a founder-level sense of ownership.

• Daily use of AI tools and genuine curiosity to experiment with new recruiting workflows.

• Fluency in English; German is a strong plus given the DACH focus.

• Openness to grow into a broader People leadership role as the company scales.

Location

On-site in Munich, Germany. Visa sponsorship is not available.