Talent Lead

Sycamore; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Sycamore is building the trusted agent operating system for the enterprise. You will own recruiting end to end for engineering, commercial, and operations roles across both locations, shaping the candidate experience and the hiring bar as the company grows.

You will design interview processes, run outbound sourcing, and partner with founders and engineering leaders on compensation and role definition, while ensuring candid, honest conversations with candidates.

Qualifications

• 6-12 years of recruiting experience with in-house technical hiring.
• Proven success hiring engineers via outbound sourcing.
• Ability to discuss candidate work and assess resumes beyond keywords.
• Experience designing interview processes and calibrating interviewers.
• Excellent written communication and integrity with candidates.
• Comfort with startup ambiguity and broad ownership.

Responsibilities

• Own recruiting end to end for engineering, commercial, and operations roles across both locations.
• Build and run outbound sourcing for strong candidates not applying proactively.
• Partner with founders and engineering leaders on hiring plans, leveling, and compensation.
• Own the candidate experience, including for candidates not hired.
• Close candidates honestly, communicating tradeoffs of joining a small, ambitious company.
• Protect the hiring bar as the company grows and raise it as needed.
• Contribute to how Sycamore presents itself to candidates and describes roles.

Skills

Recruiting

Outbound sourcing

Interview design

Candidate experience

Hiring strategy

Communication

Tools

AI tools

ATS / HRIS

Job description

Own how Sycamore hires: the bar, the process, and the experience of every candidate who goes through it.

About Sycamore

Sycamore is building the trusted agent operating system for the enterprise. Our platform helps companies build, deploy, and orchestrate agentic apps that take on real operational work, with the security and control large organizations need.

We are a small, engineering-led team working directly with Fortune 500 enterprises. We have raised $65M from Coatue and Lightspeed, along with other investors and industry leaders.

The role

Hiring is the highest-leverage thing a company our size does, and it is the thing most companies do worst as they grow. You will own the full function: sourcing and pipeline for hard technical and commercial roles, interview design and calibration, the operating cadence that keeps hiring moving, closing candidates, and the standards that keep the bar from drifting as we grow.

You will work directly with the founders and with engineering leaders, and you are expected to have a point of view about who is actually good and to defend it. A recruiter who only schedules interviews is not what this role is. Most of the people we want to hire are not looking, so reaching them requires understanding what we are building well enough to have a real conversation about it, and being honest about the tradeoffs of joining a small company solving hard problems.

What you will do

• Own recruiting end to end for engineering, commercial, and operations roles across both locations.
• Build and run outbound sourcing for roles where the strongest candidates are not applying.
• Partner with founders and engineering leaders on hiring plans, role definition, leveling, and compensation.
• Own the candidate experience, including for candidates we do not hire.
• Close candidates honestly, including being clear about what is hard about working here.
• Protect the hiring bar as the company grows, and raise it where it should be higher.
• Contribute to how Sycamore presents itself to candidates, including how we describe our roles and our work.

What we are looking for

• 6-12 years of recruiting experience, including in-house ownership of technical hiring at a high-growth company. We will make exceptions for exceptional people in either direction.
• A track record of hiring strong engineers through outbound work, not primarily through inbound volume or agencies.
• The technical literacy to have a substantive conversation with an engineer about what they have built, and to assess a résumé beyond keyword matching.
• Evidence that you have raised or held a hiring bar under pressure to fill roles quickly.
• Experience designing interview processes and calibrating interviewers, rather than inheriting a loop and running it.
• Excellent written communication. Your outreach should be worth replying to.
• High integrity with candidates. You represent the company honestly, including its difficulties.
• AI-native. You use modern AI systems to expand your sourcing and research throughput, while keeping the human judgment and the candidate experience yours.
• Comfort with startup ambiguity, broad ownership, and building a function rather than joining one.

Experience building a hiring function in more than one country is valuable but not required.

Interview process

• A 30-minute introductory conversation.
• Two 60-minute conversations, one on how you source and assess candidates and one on hiring strategy and process design.
• A working session where you build a sourcing and hiring approach for a role we are actually trying to fill, and present it.

Why join

• Own the function that most determines whether the company succeeds.
• Hire for genuinely hard technical roles at a company doing work worth describing.
• Build the hiring bar and process from an early stage rather than inheriting one.
• Work directly with the founders and engineering leadership on every consequential hire.
• Help build one engineering team, wherever its people sit.
• Receive competitive cash compensation and meaningful equity in the company you are helping build.