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Talent Engineer
Causa Prima
Source: Headcount Labs · original listing ↗
Job data: Headcount Labs, ODbL 1.0. Job descriptions belong to their employers.
Posted Oct 29
About this role
You'll build the hiring machine that staffs an agentic AI company. Our bar doesn't move. We hire only people who raise it. At least two founders speak to every candidate. And everyone does a trial day before getting an offer: one paid day inside the company on a real problem we're actually facing right now, scored on how you prioritise and think rather than on how polished the output looks. No puzzles, no homework, no theatre. That process works, and right now it runs on founder time. Your job is to take it over, make it faster and sharper, and automate most of it without lowering the bar by a single point. You'll own hiring end to end for engineering, product and GTM roles across two jurisdictions, and you'll build the systems that do the work: sourcing agents, enrichment pipelines, scoring rubrics, ATS automation. 80% of our team comes from technical backgrounds and 100% is AI-native. You're the person who hires them, so you have to work the way they do. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own the funnel end to end. From role definition and JD to sourcing, screening, founder loops, trial day, references, offer and signature. You are the single owner of time-to-hire and offer-accept rate, not a coordinator between other people's decisions. - Build the sourcing engine. Agentic sourcing pipelines, enrichment and scoring over the Ashby API, outbound that reads like a human wrote it because you taught the system how we talk. Manual sourcing is the fallback, not the method. - Generate demand for Causa Prima as a place to work. Think like a marketer, not a coordinator. Figure out where the best engineers, product people and operators in Europe (and beyond) actually pay attention, and get us in front of them: founder content, communities, events, hiring campaigns, referral loops. Inbound quality is a number you move on purpose. - Run trial days. The hiring manager sets the task, you run the day. Then you synthesise feedback from the team into one clear read, chase the stragglers, and force a decision inside 48 hours. - Win the offer without breaking the band. Carry the compensation conversation: internal bands, the equity story, Beckham Law maths for Madrid relocations, why P50 to P75 cash plus meaningful early equity is the right trade at this stage. Hold the band. Get the yes anyway. - Instrument everything. Stage conversion, source quality, interviewer calibration drift, rejection-to-referral rate. Kill what doesn't convert. Report what you learn so the founders can act on it in a Daily. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - You run on AI, not next to it. You've rebuilt how you work around these tools and your throughput shows it. Not a copilot open in the corner: agents, scripts, API integrations, workflow automation, shipped in the last month and faster than what you did before. This is what makes you high leverage, and it's also what lets you hold a real conversation with the people you're recruiting. - Full-cycle recruiting under a high bar. 3+ years hiring engineers, product or GTM at a startup or somewhere genuinely selective. You've said no to a lot of people you liked, and you've closed people who had better-paying offers on the table. - A network you can actually call. Real relationships across European startups, VCs and engineering communities. Warm intros, not a LinkedIn follower count. - Taste for talent. You form a strong view fast, put it in writing, and it holds up under founder scrutiny. You can tell original thinking from AI-generated polish, because you read the reasoning and not the formatting. - Candidate-experience obsession. Rejections people thank you for. Feedback that's honest and specific. Our funnel is a marketing surface and you treat it as one. - Bias to shipped decisions. You turn ambiguity into a default proposal, an owner and a deadline. Comfortable being measured on hires closed, not activity. - Fluent English. Spanish or German is useful. This is a wishlist, not a checklist. If the role excites you but you don't tick every box, we would encourage you to apply anyway. NICE TO HAVE - You've done more than HR. Time as a generalist, founder's associate, engineer, product or GTM person. You understand the work you're hiring for from the inside. - Ashby depth. Deep admin experience with Ashby, or another ATS you've bent well past its intended shape. - AI/ML hiring context. You've hired ML, LLM or agentic AI engineers and can hold a credible technical conversation about what they build. - Multi-jurisdiction hiring. Spain and Germany: EOR versus local entity, contractor-misclassification risk, notice periods, what actually moves a candidate's net pay.