Founding Talent Partner

Creandum; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Trajectory is hiring a Founding Talent Partner to build the team behind our continual-learning platform. You will be our first talent hire, working directly with the founders as we scale the team. This is a hands-on role.

You'll run searches end-to-end while setting the standard for how Trajectory hires: what great looks like, how we assess it, and the tools and systems we build on. We need someone experienced enough to be a trusted partner to founders and senior leaders, and independent enough

Qualifications

• Strong technical recruiting background with a track record in high-growth startups.
• Hands-on and able to build a function without a playbook.
• Credible with technical founders, researchers and senior candidates.
• Experience guiding senior stakeholders on best practices and trade-offs.

Responsibilities

• Own hiring end-to-end across engineering, research, product and GTM.
• Design structured interview processes, scorecards and assessments.
• Build and evolve the talent system, tools and reporting.
• Coach interviewers and hiring managers to improve hiring outcomes.

Skills

Technical recruiting

Hands-on

Credible with founders

Guide senior stakeholders

Independent

Modern recruiting stack

Systems thinker

Clear communication

Education

Tools

ATS

Sourcing tools

AI automation

Job description

About Trajectory

Trajectory is a research and product lab creating the platform for continual learning.

AI is the most capable software ever built, and the least able to learn. Every valuable correction and edit that happens in a product evaporates at the next session. A few teams have closed this gap by hand-coupling their models to their products: Composer, Claude Code, Windsurf SWE-1.

Trajectory is the first scalable approach for every company: our platform unlocks the signal already sitting in product use, so companies can continuously post-train large-scale agentic models that outperform the frontier. Working with leading AI companies, including Decagon, Clay, Harvey, Mercor, and Rogo.

Founded by researchers from DeepMind, OpenAI, Meta, Apple, Amazon, and Scale. Raised $60M from Sequoia, Conviction, along with Fei-Fei Li, Jeff Dean, and founders of Notion, Braintrust, Modal, Hugging Face, Dropbox.

The Role

Trajectory is hiring a Founding Talent Partner to build the team behind our continual-learning platform. You will be our first talent hire, working directly with the founders as we scale the team.

This is a hands-on role. You'll run searches end-to-end while setting the standard for how Trajectory hires: what great looks like, how we assess it, and the tools and systems we build on. We need someone experienced enough to be a trusted partner to founders and senior leaders, and independent enough to build the function without a playbook.

What You'll Do

Own hiring end-to-end

• Run full-cycle recruiting across engineering, research and product, as well as go-to-market and operations.
• Manage the hiring process from identifying key talent, outreach, assessment and closing.
• Partner with the team on events and community to build a pool of engaged talent.
• Close candidates in one of the most competitive talent markets in the world, representing the mission, the research and the opportunity with credibility.

Set the bar

• Partner with founders and hiring managers to define each role and what exceptional looks like.
• Design structured interview processes, scorecards and assessments that surface real signal.
• Coordinate debriefs and calibration so hiring decisions are consistent, rigorous and fast.
• Hold the bar on quality, especially when there's pressure to hire quickly.

Build the talent system

• Choose and evolve the tools we'll scale on: ATS, sourcing tools, AI automation, scheduling and reporting.
• Define metrics for pipeline health, conversion, speed and quality of hire, and use them to improve.
• Build a candidate experience that reflects how Trajectory works: fast, thoughtful and transparent.
• Create lightweight processes that scale with the team without adding bureaucracy.

Develop talent muscle

• Partner closely with the founders on hiring plans, sequencing, org design and market insight, including compensation and talent availability.
• Coach interviewers and hiring managers to assess, sell and close consistently.
• Strengthen hiring as a shared responsibility across the team, not a service that sits to one side.

Who You Are

• You have a strong technical recruiting background, with a track record of hiring exceptional engineers and researchers, ideally in a high-growth startup.
• You are hands-on, able to find people others miss and know how to engage them.
• You are credible with technical founders, researchers and senior candidates, and can talk about the work with real understanding.
• You have the experience to guide senior stakeholders on best practice and the confidence to push back.
• You are independent and have built, or been early in, a recruiting function.
• You know the modern recruiting stack, including how to use AI to move faster.
• You are a systems thinker with high standards and low ego, and you move quickly.
• You communicate and write with clarity.