Talent Lead Palo Alto

Sycamore Labs, Inc.; Palo Alto (CA); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Sycamore is building the trusted agent operating system for the enterprise. This role owns the full recruiting function across engineering, commercial, and operations, partnering with founders and engineering leaders to hire top talent in a high-growth environment.

You will design interview processes, raise the hiring bar, and leverage AI tools to expand sourcing while preserving human judgment and a positive candidate experience.

Qualifications

• 6–12 years of recruiting experience with in-house tech hiring.
• Proven track record hiring engineers via outbound sourcing.
• Ability to assess a résumé beyond keyword matching.
• Experience designing interview processes and calibrating interviewers.
• Excellent written communication and candiate honesty.
• Experience using AI-driven sourcing to scale outreach.

Responsibilities

• Own recruiting end to end for engineering, commercial, and operations roles.
• Build and run outbound sourcing for passive candidates.
• 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 what is hard about working here.
• Protect the hiring bar as the company grows and raise it where needed.
• Contribute to how Sycamore presents itself to candidates.

Skills

Outbound sourcing

Interview design

Hiring strategy

Candidate experience

Written communication

AI-enabled sourcing

Job description

Go-to-Market & Operations · Palo Alto · full-time

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

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

Hard problems, real impact

Trust architectures, memory systems, multi-agent coordination. The foundational layer that makes agentic apps work in production.

Small team, high ownership

Every engineer shapes the product and the culture. No layers of process between you and the work that matters.

Backed by the best

$65M from Coatue, Lightspeed, Abstract Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, 8VC, and notable industry angels.

Grow with us

Competitive compensation, meaningful equity, and a genuine focus on your growth as the company scales.