Founding Recruiter, Technical

Lightfield; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Early equity

Health insurance

3 weeks PTO

11 company holidays

Paid family leave

WFH Wednesdays

Team events

401k plan

Commuter stipend

Job summary

Lightfield is building an AI-native CRM and is seeking a senior recruiter to own talent across Engineering and GTM. You will manage full-cycle recruiting, craft an employer brand, and develop a scalable sourcing engine for senior engineers in a fast-paced, early-stage startup.

You will partner with hiring managers to calibrate interview processes, close top talent, and maintain a high-velocity, candidate-focused process that reflects Lightfield's ambitious growth trajectory and culture.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of full-cycle recruiting in fast-paced, high-growth environments.
• Proven ability to hire senior and staff-level engineers in competitive markets.
• Experience building recruiting systems and processes in ambiguous startup environments.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end recruiting across Engineering and GTM.
• Define talent strategy and build employer brand to attract top engineers.
• Develop data-driven sourcing pipelines across outbound, referrals, events, and community.
• Implement appropriate ATS structure and communication discipline for a lean startup.

Skills

Full-cycle recruiting

Sourcing

Employer branding

Interviewing

Tools

ATS

Job description

About Lightfield

Lightfield is an AI-native CRM that assembles itself from your email, calendar, and meetings. It captures every interaction and turns it into organized context: accounts, tasks, follow-ups, and insights, so nothing slips through the cracks.

We’re rethinking CRM from first principles. Instead of forcing teams to maintain rigid systems, Lightfield learns from how companies actually work, adapting, automating, and surfacing the insight that drives growth. We’re building the CRM platform we always wished existed: fast, intelligent, and genuinely helpful.

We are backed by Greylock, Lightspeed, and Coatue, and our founders previously built Tome, a generative AI presentation product used by over 25 million people. Before Lightfield, our team worked on Llama, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Pinterest, Google, and Salesforce.

About The Role

Lightfield is reinventing CRM from the ground up - and we're doing it fast. We're an early-stage startup where every hire directly shapes our trajectory, and we need someone who is energized by that pressure, not intimidated by it. Reporting directly to the CEO, you'll own talent across Engineering and GTM in one of the most critical phases of company building: the zero-to-one sprint where the right hires compound and the wrong ones cost months. Your north star is scaling a world-class engineering team without losing the bar.

What You’ll Own

• Full-spectrum recruiting - end-to-end ownership across Engineering and GTM, with a heavy center of gravity on scaling early-stage engineering teams fast. Senior engineers, ML specialists, infrastructure leads - you know how to find them, pitch them, and close them in competitive markets.


• Talent strategy & employer brand - define what "great" looks like at an early-stage company moving at our speed, craft the narrative that makes elite engineers and operators choose us over the big names, and build the employer brand from scratch.


• Sourcing engine, zero to one - there's no inherited playbook here. You'll build repeatable, data-driven pipelines from the ground up across outbound, referrals, events, and community - and iterate on them constantly.


• Process & tooling - implement the right amount of ATS structure and communication discipline for a lean, fast-moving startup so no great candidate ever falls through the cracks - without over-engineering for a company our size.


• Candidate experience - run a crisp, high-velocity process that respects candidates' time and turns skeptics into advocates, hired or not.


• Hiring manager partnership - coach managers across functions on calibration, interview technique, and closing; surface weekly funnel insights so leadership always knows where things stand.

Who You Are

• 5+ years of full-cycle recruiting, with a heavy focus on scaling early-stage engineering teams in fast-paced, high-growth environments


• A proven closer who has landed senior and staff-level engineers in competitive markets - and can tell the story of how


• A builder by nature - you've stood up or overhauled recruiting systems from scratch in ambiguous, low-infrastructure startup environments and thrived in it


• Comfortable with speed and ambiguity - at an early-stage startup, the priorities shift, the roles evolve, and the bar keeps moving; you adjust without losing momentum


• Autonomous and decisive - you operate well as a team of one, make trade-offs without hand-holding, and iterate fast


• Genuinely motivated by the mission, not just the process - you want to help build something from the ground up, not just fill seats

Benefits & Perks

• Competitive salary


• Meaningful early equity


• Health insurance (medical, dental, vision)


• 3 weeks of PTO


• 11 paid company holidays + we enjoy a winter holiday break


• 3 months of paid family leave


• Wednesdays work from home


• Regular team dinners, events, offsites, and retreats


• 401k plan


• Other perks include: commuter and lunch stipend