Founding Head of Recruiting

Job discovery is broken. Indeed and LinkedIn want to keep it that way. Join our team and help millions of people put food on the table by finding the perfect job.

HiringCafe is building a 100× better job search engine — fast, comprehensive, honest, and actually useful. We index millions of jobs, remove noise, rank what matters, and help people find real opportunities without dark patterns, ads, or pay-to-win placement.

We are funded by top tier investors in Silicon Valley, along with angel investments from former leadership and directors at Indeed and ZipRecruiter. In 12 months, we grew from 0 → 1 million+ monthly active users - all with a $0 marketing budget! Now, we are looking for a founding team member to help take us from 1M to 10M+ MAUs.

Our team

• Hamed Nilforoshan - Stanford AI PhD, Data Science at Airbnb & Snapchat

• Ali Mir - SWE at Meta, Rippling, DoorDash

• Jure Leskovec - Stanford AI Professor, ex-Chief Scientist at Pinterest

The role

We are looking for a Founding Head of Recruiting to architect, build, and execute our elite talent acquisition engine. This role is heavily focused on sourcing, closing, and retaining top-tier, high-impact talent across engineering, product, and growth. We need a deeply strategic and resourceful recruiting leader who possesses an extreme amount of grit and the startup hustle required to build something massive.

You will work hand-in-hand with the founders to design hiring pipelines, craft employer branding, and drive aggressive outbound sourcing, all while rolling up your sleeves to handle day-to-day full-cycle recruiting.

What you bring to the table

• Elite Sourcing & Assessment Expertise: You understand exactly what top 1% talent looks like. You are highly strategic in your recruiting approach and can speak the same language as our engineers when assessing candidates and selling our technical vision.

• Extreme Grit and Hustle: You are relentless, move fast, and thrive in a high-intensity startup environment.

• Mastery of Candidate Psychology & Closing: You intuitively understand what drives top performers and know how to structure offers, handle objections, and close highly sought-after candidates flawlessly.

• Proven Talent-Building Chops: You know how to identify passive candidates, design high-converting outreach strategies, and build an incredible team without relying solely on inbound applications or expensive agencies.

• True Ownership: You do not wait for a hiring roadmap; you identify pipeline bottlenecks, optimize interview processes, and execute autonomously to fill critical gaps.

• Passionate About Team Scale: You are obsessed with pipeline efficiency, close rates, time-to-hire metrics, and scaling an elite organization from the ground up without compromising on quality.

Compensation and Perks

• Competitive pay & equity

• Flexible PTO & family leave

• Full medical, dental, and vision benefits

• Design your own perks as a core member of the founding team