🐐 Head of Talent Engineering

About the Role Zingage is hiring a Head of Talent Engineering to build the system that sources, attracts, and closes the most exceptional people to join our company. Every input to startups—capital, infrastructure, distribution—has been commoditized. Talent hasn’t. We believe recruiting should be treated as the most sophisticated form of enterprise sales and systems engineering, not HR. We’re tripling our team in the next 12 months. This role exists to design the engine that gets us there. You’ll own the talent loop that: Identifies contrarian, undervalued candidates before anyone else (the “Ilya before AlexNet”). Convince them to join Zingage over Google, Ramp, or FAANG. Builds repeatable systems—scrapers, dashboards, campaigns—that scale slope detection beyond intuition. Experiments with new ways to generate inbound talent flow (from Cluely-style marketing to network dinners). You’ll work directly with the founders (Daniel and Victor) and leverage our extended networks at Uber, Ramp, Datadog, Bessemer, SPC, and TQ Ventures to build a talent monopoly. What You’ll Do Design and run experiments in sourcing and talent marketing. Build systems (scrapers, monitoring engines, outreach pipelines) to track and engage high-slope candidates. Convince top engineers, designers, and operators to join Zingage. Create dashboards and reporting loops that treat talent as a funnel, not a list. Leverage our founder/investor networks to unlock warm channels to outlier talent. Iterate on a playbook for how startups should actually do recruiting in 2025+. Who You Are Early career (new grad, recent grad, or dropout). High slope, underestimated, hungry. Energized by talking to ambitious people and spotting slope in others. Technical enough to wire up scrapers, pipelines, and LLM workflows. Contrarian thinker: sees talent as the last non-commoditized resource and wants to build the system that cracks it. Founder-track energy: you’d rather design a system than follow one. Why Now Backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, TQ Ventures, and South Park Commons. 400+ healthcare agencies already using Zingage. We’re tripling the team this year — the bottleneck is talent, not customers or capital. This role is a founder-track apprenticeship. You’ll sit inside the highest-leverage problem in startups: building the team. Compensation Base: $100–140 (NYC) Variable: 10% of first-year salary for each hire closed ($300+ OTE) Equity Offered Interview Process Founder Screen (30 min) — slope + motivation Live Fire Test (48 hrs) — 5 contrarian talent bets + 30/60/90 system plan Workshop (1 hr) — roleplay persuading a top candidate to join Zingage vs Google Founder Fit (30 min) — ambition, agency, founder-track energy References