Founding People & Talent Lead

About the Role

This is a founding, high-impact role sitting directly alongside leadership to build the Talent and People function from scratch at a fast-growing AI startup in the enterprise sales automation space. You'll own end-to-end recruiting while laying the groundwork for the people systems — onboarding, performance, and culture — that will define how the company scales across the DACH region and beyond.

What You'll Do

• Own the full hiring engine end-to-end, from role definition and sourcing through assessment and closing.

• Spend the majority of early time on talent acquisition, personally sourcing and closing exceptional candidates across functions.

• Design and scale recruiting processes, workflows, analytics, 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 and develop People systems over time, including onboarding, performance calibration, career progression, and compensation benchmarking.

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

• Build and nurture a talent network across universities, startups, and technical communities.

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

• Uphold and protect a high hiring bar as the company 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 lead end-to-end recruiting across all teams in a hypergrowth context (e.g., growing a team from 10 to 50 or 30 to 100).

• Strong systems thinker who can design scalable processes and execute them independently.

• Track record of sourcing and closing senior candidates with compelling storytelling and relationship-building skills.

• Daily practitioner of AI tools with a genuine curiosity for experimenting with new recruiting workflows.

• Experience building employer brand and talent pipelines within the tech/startup ecosystem.

• Fluency in English required; German language skills are a strong plus.

• Comfortable with ambiguity, high agency, and growing into a broader People leadership role over time.

• Experience with performance calibration and compensation benchmarking is a nice-to-have.

Location

On-site in Munich, Germany. No visa sponsorship available.