Strategic Projects Lead, Recruiting

United States Digital Space LLC; Washington; Hybrid; USD 235,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

United States Digital Space LLC is seeking a Strategic Projects Lead to steer recruiting's most complex, cross-cutting initiatives and scale the function with structure and trust.

You'll coordinate across Recruiting Systems, Analytics, Interview Programs, and other teams, owning standards, processes, and headcount planning while maintaining clear, documented decisions in a fast-growing environment.

Qualifications

• 8–10+ years in program management, operations, chief of staff, or people/talent roles at a fast-growing company.
• Experience in a talent team or partnering with recruiting on day-to-day operations.
• Think in systems and design fixes spanning multiple teams.
• Managed several complex workstreams with strong prioritization.
• Set strategy and vision for your area rather than executing others' plans.
• Create structure in genuinely ambiguous environments.
• Applied AI to real workflows to redesign processes and speed tasks.
• Test small-scale ideas in the real world and explain what you’re not doing.
• Disagree, commit, and execute with credibility and clarity.
• Led end-to-end changes that stuck within an org.
• Close the loop and finish unglamorous work.

Responsibilities

• Take on recruiting's biggest ambiguous bets: define the problem, ship the smallest testable version, and hand each one off as a repeatable program.
• Own operating rhythm across teams that support recruiting: plan, review, and decide as one function.
• Spot recurring friction and fix the system behind it.
• Own process design during company-wide changes in recruiting and drive adoption with partners.
• Be recruiting's DRI for headcount and workforce planning, including hiring pace and regional readiness.
• Own interviewing standards: scheduling lead time and interviewer load; diagnose when it slips.
• Turn analytics into standards and simple SOPs with accessible documentation.
• Keep the right people informed at the right time without becoming a bottleneck; stay fluent in recruiting systems.
• Partner with leads for Recruiting Systems, Analytics, Interview Programs; make cross-team calls when appropriate.

Skills

8-10+ years PM/Ops

Talent team experience

Systems thinking

Multiple workstreams

Strategy & vision

Ambiguity management

AI in workflows

Experimentation

Decision discipline

Change management

Execution discipline

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Job description

About the company

the company’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About the role

We're looking for a Strategic Projects Lead to take on recruiting's most complex, cross-cutting work: the high-stakes decisions and initiatives that span many teams and don't fit neatly into any one group's remit. You'll bring the structure, coordination, and follow-through that help these get made well, and see them through as the company scales.

You'll work across every team that touches hiring, and you'll move work forward through partnership, not ownership. The job is influence: bring the right people together, make sure decisions are principled and well-documented, and keep recruiting's approach coherent over time. You'll be the most senior individual contributor for how recruiting operates, and success depends as much as on building trust across senior stakeholders with different priorities as it does on building good systems.

This is a high-autonomy role for someone who thrives in complexity and ambiguity. You know recruiting well enough to feel where it breaks, and you're energized by holding several very different problems at once and driving each to a clear resolution.

Key responsibilities

• Take on recruiting's biggest ambiguous bets: define the problem, ship the smallest testable version, and hand each one off as a repeatable program before moving to the next

• Own the operating rhythm across the teams that support recruiting, so we plan, review, and decide as one function

• Spot recurring friction and fix the system behind it, not just the case in front of you

• Own process design when company-wide changes run through recruiting, and drive them to real adoption with the partners who own the build and the comms

• Be recruiting's DRI for headcount and workforce planning, including hiring pace and readiness for new regions

• Own the operating standard for interviewing, like scheduling lead time and interviewer load, and lead the cross-team diagnosis when it slips

• Turn analytics into standards and simple SOPs, and build documentation a new leader could pick up without you in the room

• Keep the right people informed at the right time without becoming a bottleneck, and stay fluent in our recruiting systems and data so you can call the downstream impact of any decision

You'll partner directly with the leads for Recruiting Systems, Analytics, Interview Programs, and other teams. You won't run their teams or build their systems, but you'll know each well enough to make calls that hold up across all of them.

Minimum qualifications

• Have 8-10+ years in program management, business operations, chief of staff, or people/talent roles at a fast-growing company, with increasing scope over time

• Have been part of a talent team or partnered closely with one, and understand how recruiting operates day to day

• Think in systems: you see how the pieces connect, anticipate downstream effects, and design fixes that work across team boundaries

• Have owned several complex workstreams at once and made hard prioritization calls without much guidance

• Set the strategy and vision for your area rather than executing someone else's plan

• Create structure and clarity in genuinely ambiguous environments

• Have put AI to work in real workflows: redesigning process, automating the repetitive layer, and shipping faster

• Test the smallest version of an idea in the real world before building the big one, and say clearly what you're not doing and why

• Can lose a decision cleanly: disagree, commit, and execute with full credibility, knowing which calls are reversible and which aren't

• Have taken a big process or policy change through an organization end to end and made it stick

• Close the loop, hold the bar, and finish the unglamorous work

Preferred qualifications

• Experience running recruiting or talent operations at global scale

• Working knowledge of recruiting compliance, like OFCCP, GDPR, and regional employment law, and how it shapes process and systems decisions

• Experience in deep-tech environments with technical recruiting complexity

• Experience operating across multiple time zones and jurisdictions

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary:

$235,000—$300,000 USD

LogisticsMinimum education:

Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience

Required field of study:

A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Minimum years of experience:

Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

Location-based hybrid policy:

Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa sponsorship:

We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.