Head of Talent (Founding)

About Us In partnership with Sony and SBI — two of Japan's largest companies — we are building the infrastructure to bring the world's assets on-chain: Strium , a next-generation DeFi L1 powered by a fully on-chain orderbook exchange, and Startale App , a consumer super-app. Distributed across Tokyo, New York, and Singapore; English-operating; built to a world-class standard. Position Overview There are engineers in your head right now — people you could message on Monday who would actually reply — because you invested in those relationships for years, long before you needed them. You've closed Staff- and Director-level engineers who weren't looking, for companies they'd never heard of, with no famous logo doing the convincing for you. And you've done it in more than one world: you can walk into a domain that isn't yours, earn credibility, and build a live pipeline from nothing. If that's you, read on. If your hires came from inbound, job boards, or agency hand-offs — or if your strength is being known in one community rather than closing hard candidates — this isn't your seat. We're hiring the person engineers say yes to, not the person engineers have heard of. We're looking for a founding Head of Talent to build our hiring engine from zero. A CV-screening AI is already live; you start from a working component, not a blank page. You will not inherit a playbook — you will write it. What the First Months Demand Our engineering team is small and early. We can't yet lean on internal referrals, and we don't have a consumer brand that makes great engineers apply on their own. So your first job is not to build a funnel and wait — it's to reach into relationships you already have and land our first elite engineers in weeks, not quarters . Those hires become the seed the rest of the engine grows from. Then you prove it wasn't one lucky rolodex. You do it again in Strium's world — exchange-grade financial infrastructure — which shares almost no talent pool with consumer product engineering. That second act is the real test of this role. Why This Role Matters Product velocity, the team we become, the standard we hold — all of it assumes one capability we don't yet have: consistently landing elite engineers. The first hires you make set the bar for everyone who follows, and you become the talent voice founders and engineering leadership align around. If that's the work you've been looking for, this is the chair. Team and Stakeholders Reports to the Chief of Staff (cofounder) . Daily collaboration with the engineering manager, department head and founders. The first dedicated talent hire — you build the function, not slot into one. Solo, for now. What You'll Own Engineering hiring end-to-end — direct sourcing through close — solo, with no recruiting org behind you. The first critical hires: product engineering for Startale App (frontend and backend), then the harder, different world of Strium financial-infrastructure engineering. A repeatable engine: process, scorecards, and playbook built from scratch; first-pass screening; operating and sharpening our in-house screening AI (deep technical evaluation stays with the CTO and EMs — you keep the funnel pointed at their bar, calibrated on real candidates, not adjectives). A referral flywheel seeded from those first hires. Refining our existing global pipeline (e.g., L1 / protocol roles) — screening questions and code-review flow — for speed and quality. Adjacent hiring (product, business, PM) as we scale. This is a writing-heavy role: your specs and briefs align engineering and external partners. Requirements Closing without a brand — the one that matters most. You have personally sourced and closed senior/leadership engineers (Staff+, EM, Director) through direct, cold outreach, for companies whose name did not open the door. If your closes came through inbound, agencies, or employer brand, this role will surface that quickly. A living network, not a past one. The test is simple: if you started Monday, who could you message and expect a reply from? You can name people — because you've kept relationships warm for years, and engineers you placed long ago still take your call and still refer to you. Being well-known in a community is not this. Your network is alive, not a contact list. Portability — you build networks that aren't yours. You've broken into a domain where you had no prior standing and built a live pipeline there. Not optional: you'll start in consumer product engineering and then do it again in financial-infrastructure engineering — a different world, a different talent pool. Domain-adaptive judgment. "Great" is not one thing. The bar for a Startale App product engineer (velocity, product sense, modern stack) is not the bar for a Strium systems engineer (correctness and robustness at scale — where a background at a bank, exchange, or large SIer is an asset , not a red flag). You switch calibration deliberately and can explain why. Founder's ownership. You've built a hiring function from zero, not only operated inside one. You define your own scope, process, and bar. Startup way of working. Direction and products will change under you; you move with it, hold no ego about scope, and pick up what needs picking up. Technical literacy & English. Technical enough that understanding the engineering changes how you screen, and to operate/improve an AI screening setup (ex-engineer is a plus, not required). English is the floor, not a plus — you source, write, and close in it daily on a distributed team. Strong plus Presence in the Japanese, English-speaking engineering community; hiring bilingual JP engineers. Crypto/Web3 or high-growth startup hiring; fintech/exchange/financial-infrastructure hiring, or sourcing strong financial-institution/SIer talent. Ex-engineer, or a genuine following in an engineering community (talks, meetups, writing). Standing up a novel hiring function from scratch (e.g., FDE / GTM-engineering). Location, Engagement, Compensation Tokyo · Independent contractor· reports to the Chief of Staff (cofounder). Compensation aligned with our Global Salary Standard plus equity. Benefits: unlimited time off, stock options, annual workations (recent: Seoul, Tokyo, Croatia, Turkey, Belgium), premium tooling from machine to AI agents. Why Join Us The scale of the bet. We're aiming at a global, category-defining outcome only a handful of startups ever reach — Nasdaq/NYSE scale — building onchain financial infrastructure with Sony and SBI behind us. An early stage without the fragility. A $63M Series A and tier-1 Japanese partners — yet ~70 people, pre-PMF, early enough that what you build shapes the company. Plus early equity in a company chasing an outcome this size. A founding mandate. You won't slot into a machine — you build the talent function from zero, report to a cofounder, and define the bar the entire company hires against. Champions, not passengers. Everyone here owns their surface and creates value as a Champion — and you'll recruit alongside genuinely world-class, global talent. Open culture, real Winning Mindset. Information is shared in the open; we don't run on politics or inter-team turf wars. People here are betting their careers on winning — and act like it.