Founding Talent Lead

Ankar AI; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 60,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

A forward-thinking technology company in London is seeking a Recruiting Specialist to drive talent acquisition strategies and enhance the employer brand. The ideal candidate has several years of experience in recruiting within high-growth startups, overseeing the full hiring lifecycle. This full-time role offers competitive compensation, including equity, and operates under an office-first policy with flexibility. Opportunities to lead and influence the company culture are significant as the company scales.

Benefits

Competitive salaries

Substantial equity package under EMI scheme

Flexible office-first policy

Qualifications

• Several years of recruiting experience, ideally in a high-growth technology startup.
• Experience across the full recruitment lifecycle: sourcing, screening, interviewing, and closing.
• A proven track record of successfully hiring high-impact roles, especially in software engineering.

Responsibilities

• Design and execute end-to-end talent acquisition strategies across multiple functions.
• Partner with hiring managers to define role requirements and build candidate pipelines.
• Own our employer brand and enhance the candidate experience.

Skills

Recruiting experience

Full recruitment lifecycle

Business acumen

Creativity in talent sourcing

Tools

Applicant tracking systems

Job description

The way companies innovate is broken. The systems built to create and protect ideas can’t keep up with the pace of change. Today, 90% of S&P 500 company value is intangible (e.g., IP) — yet R&D and IP teams spend half their time buried in manual work, sifting through patents and paperwork instead of pushing the frontier forward. The tools of creating and protecting are stuck in the past. We’re here to fix that.

Ankar is building the AI Platform for the Trillion Dollar Innovation Economy — a suite of tools that helps inventors explore, create, and protect ideas. We’re removing the friction from the invention process, starting with IP protection and expanding toward creation and exploration.

We’re already seeing this vision come to life:

• Achieved $1M+ ARR, with 75% of this coming in the last 5 months
• Loved by F500 companies & top law firms, with 60% of new business from word of mouth
• Assembled a world-class team from Palantir, Amazon, and BCG to tackle the next frontier of invention creation and expanding into a $1T+ market.
• Raised £3m from Index Ventures, Founder of Hugging Face, CEO of Datadog, and product leaders from DeepMind and OpenAI.

We’re now expanding the team and looking for builders who want to own ambitious projects autonomously, solve impactful & complex problems, and do their best work at Ankar.

What You’ll Be Doing

You’ll join as a high-impact individual contributor owning our recruiting strategy and execution, with a clear path to grow into our first Talent leader as we built our in-house talent engine. In this role, you will help us build one of the highest talent density teams in Europe. In particular, you will:

• Design and execute end-to-end talent acquisition strategies across multiple functions. You are responsible for building our technical and GTM hiring pipeline.
• Partner with hiring managers to define role requirements, hiring plans, and success profiles; build world-class candidate pipelines
• Own our employer brand and deliver an exceptional candidate experience at every touchpoint
• Implement scalable recruiting processes, tools, and systems that enable us to hire faster and smarter
• Leverage data and analytics to drive hiring decisions, measure results, and improve performance over time

What we are looking for

We’re looking for hungry, scrappy executors who thrive in ambiguity and take full ownership of their work. People who are passionate about hiring exceptional talent, building an outstanding culture, and ultimately leading a team to do this as we scale to thousands of people.

You might be a great fit for this role if you have:

• Several years of recruiting experience, ideally in a high-growth technology startup
• Experience across the full recruitment lifecycle (sourcing, screening, interviewing, and closing) and in designing and implementing recruitment processes and tools (e.g., applicant tracking systems)
• A proven track record of successfully hiring high-impact roles at scale — particularly in software engineering.
• You have a strong business acumen to deeply understand the challenges of our business and identify talent creatively. You don't just fill roles with people who can do the job. You surface A+ players with the potential for outsize impact with creativity.

What Else You Might Want To Know

• Location: Hoxton Square, London (we operate an office first policy with flexibility)
• Contract: Full-time
• Compensation: We pay competitive salaries and will reward you with a substantial equity package under the tax-efficient EMI scheme.
• Hiring process: (1) 30min introductory chat, (2) 45min remote interview (3) 1hr onsite interview. The process can be as fast you want it to be.

Learn more about our team and our ambitions here.