Founding Recruiting Lead
At a glance
Senior Recruiting & Talent Acquisition role at Mach9. San Francisco · full-time · $150,000–$200,000 base.
hrroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Run searches from candidate sourcing through interview coordination and offer close across technical and non-technical jobs
- Build the hiring setup, including the ATS, interview scorecards, compensation alignment and manager expectations
- Work with hiring managers to define candidate criteria and design interviews that assess those criteria
- Use conversion rates, hiring timelines and accepted offers to guide recruiting decisions
- Set recruiting priorities with the founders and shape job descriptions and the external candidate experience
What you bring
- You have five to seven years of experience recruiting candidates through the full hiring cycle
- You can manage several open searches across different functions with strong organization and attention to detail
- You communicate clearly, build rapport across levels and can both persuade candidates and challenge hiring managers
Who this fits
This suits a senior recruiter ready to establish a talent function and work directly with founders and hiring managers. Technical recruiting experience and time at a startup are advantages.
From the employer
Mach9 builds software for Spatial Intelligence, transforming how civil engineering teams model, design, build, and maintain the physical world.
Our first product, Mach9 Digital Surveyor, uses AI to automate manual surveying workflows by extracting infrastructure features like signs, curbs, lane markings, and utility poles from large-scale geospatial data. With major customers across transportation, utilities, engineering, and infrastructure, Mach9 is growing quickly and building the team that will define the future of software for the physical world.
As Mach9’s Founding Recruiting Lead, you will build the talent function from scratch and help define how Mach9 attracts, evaluates, and closes exceptional talent. This is a highly cross-functional, full-cycle recruiting role spanning sourcing, candidate engagement, interview process management, and closing across engineering, product, go-to-market, and operations.
You will work closely with the CEO, CTO, and broader leadership team to define recruiting strategy, build scalable recruiting infrastructure, shape hiring processes, and help make critical decisions about how Mach9 identifies, evaluates, and closes exceptional talent.
Responsibilities
Own full-cycle recruiting across technical and non-technical roles: Sourcing, coordinating, and closing.
Own the candidate experience end-to-end: Every touchpoint, every piece of feedback, every offer call; we want every person who goes through our process to walk away excited about what we're building, whether or not they join
Build the recruiting infrastructure from scratch: ATS, interview rubrics, comp calibration, hiring manager alignment, then keep improving it as we grow
Partner closely with hiring managers: Deep calibration on what we're looking for, building interview loops that actually test for the right things, etc.
Track the data that matters: Passthrough rates, time-to-fill, offer acceptance rates. Use it to make better decisions, not just report numbers
Own our recruiting brand: Job descriptions, how we show up externally, and the story we tell about what we're building and why it matters
Own recruiting strategy alongside the founders: Which roles to prioritize, how to think about team composition, and how hiring decisions today shape the company six months from now
Requirements
5–7 years of full-cycle recruiting experience; technical recruiting background is a strong plus, as is at least one stint at a startup
Comfortable with modern recruiting tools (ATS platforms like Ashby, sourcing tools, LinkedIn Recruiter)
Builds relationships quickly across all levels (candidates, hiring managers, founders) and adjusts communication style accordingly
Creative sourcer who finds candidates others overlook, and tenacious enough to follow through
Highly organized with strong attention to detail; can run multiple open roles across different functions simultaneously without things falling through the cracks
Clear, direct communicator in writing and in conversation- equally comfortable selling a candidate on the role and pushing back on a hiring manager