Founding People & Talent Lead

ABOUT THE ROLE

This is a founding People and Talent role at a fast-growing AI-powered enterprise software startup in Munich, where you will build the entire hiring engine and people function from scratch. Working directly with the founding team, you will own end-to-end recruiting while shaping how the company onboards, develops, and retains talent as it scales across the DACH region and beyond. Talent is the single largest scaling bottleneck at this stage, so the impact of this role is immediate and central to the company's growth.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Lead recruiting end-to-end across all functions, from role definition through to offer and close.
• Source and close exceptional candidates, with a heavy focus on hands-on talent work in the early stage.
• Design and scale recruiting processes, 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 out people systems over time, including onboarding, performance calibration, career progression, and compensation benchmarking.
• Develop and grow the employer brand to attract top talent in the DACH region and beyond.
• Build a talent pipeline through networks spanning universities, startups, and technical communities.
• Use and experiment with AI tools to increase recruiting velocity and quality.
• Uphold a high bar for hiring quality and implement measures to maintain standards as the team scales.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• 2 to 5 years of experience spanning both talent acquisition and broader people topics such as performance or organizational development.
• Hands-on experience at a hypergrowth startup, for example scaling a team from 10 to 50 or 30 to 100 employees.
• Proven ability to run end-to-end recruiting while building scalable hiring systems and analytics.
• Track record of sourcing and closing senior candidates, with strong storytelling and relationship-building skills.
• Comfort with and curiosity about AI tools, with a habit of experimenting with new recruiting workflows.
• Fluency in English; German language skills are a strong plus.
• High agency, comfort with ambiguity, and a willingness to grow into a broader People leadership role over time.

LOCATION

On-site in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.