Founding & Lead Recruiter Roles | AI Startups | $110K–$210K+

CoffeeSpace is partnering with several high-growth startups to identify exceptional recruiters and talent operators for a range of early and foundational recruiting roles.

These companies span AI, healthcare, cybersecurity, B2B software, and recruiting technology, with opportunities ranging from Founding Recruiter and GTM Recruiter to Recruiting Operations and People Operations.

Most are looking for people who want to do more than manage an existing recruiting machine. You’ll help build the machine.

Roles: Founding Recruiter, GTM Recruiter, Lead Recruiter, Recruiting Operations, Recruiting + People Ops

Locations: Primarily San Francisco, with select opportunities in New York and Denver

Work setup: On-site or hybrid, typically 3–5 days/week depending on the company

Compensation: Approximately $110K–$210K+ base depending on experience and role, with equity available across opportunities

Employment type: Full-time

Visa: Varies by company. Some opportunities support visa sponsorship or transfers, while others require existing US work authorization.

About the companies

We’re partnering with a group of venture-backed startups building across some of the fastest-growing areas in technology.

The opportunities include companies applying AI to healthcare workflows, patient access and medical operations; cybersecurity platforms protecting businesses from emerging threats; B2B software companies rebuilding legacy enterprise workflows; and companies developing new infrastructure for how organizations hire and scale.

Several have grown from small founding teams into organizations with dozens or hundreds of employees in only a few years. Others are earlier, with their first dedicated recruiter joining at a point where hiring is becoming one of the company's most important constraints.

Across the group, recruiting is being treated as a strategic function rather than an administrative one.

About the opportunities

Depending on the role, you could join as the first recruiter, own a particular recruiting function such as GTM, or build the recruiting operations infrastructure supporting a rapidly growing talent team.

These roles generally fall into four tracks:

Founding / Full-Cycle Recruiting

Own recruiting from sourcing through close across engineering, product, sales, operations, and other functions. Partner directly with founders and hiring managers while establishing the company's recruiting processes from the ground up.

GTM Recruiting

Build Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Revenue Operations, Partnerships, and leadership teams. Several companies are specifically looking for recruiters who have hired Enterprise AEs, first-in-seat GTM leaders, or scaled commercial organizations during periods of rapid growth.

Recruiting Operations

Design the infrastructure behind a high-performing recruiting organization: ATS architecture, workflows, automations, analytics, dashboards, sourcing systems, AI tooling, and recruiter enablement.

Recruiting + People Operations

Combine full-cycle recruiting with early People Operations responsibilities such as onboarding, benefits, policies, payroll support, culture, and internal systems.

What you may work on

Across these opportunities, responsibilities can include:

• Owning full-cycle recruiting from sourcing and screening through offer and close
• Building high-quality outbound pipelines for difficult technical or GTM searches
• Partnering directly with founders, executives, and hiring managers on hiring strategy
• Defining candidate profiles, scorecards, interview loops, and hiring processes
• Building recruiting systems and processes from scratch rather than inheriting established playbooks
• Managing and optimizing tools such as Ashby, Greenhouse, Lever, LinkedIn Recruiter, Gem, and other sourcing platforms
• Using AI and automation tools to improve sourcing, screening, coordination, reporting, and pipeline management
• Tracking funnel performance, time-to-hire, sourcing conversion, offer acceptance, and other recruiting metrics
• Building recruiting dashboards and operational reporting
• Creating scalable hiring infrastructure as teams grow rapidly
• In some roles, supporting onboarding, benefits, people policies, culture, and broader People Operations

What the teams are looking for

The exact profile varies by opportunity, but the strongest candidates will generally have:

• Roughly 2–8+ years of recruiting, talent, or recruiting operations experience, depending on role seniority
• Meaningful experience at an early-stage or high-growth startup
• Full-cycle recruiting experience with demonstrated ownership rather than solely coordination
• Strong outbound sourcing ability and experience engaging passive candidates
• Experience recruiting technical, GTM, or both types of talent depending on the opportunity
• A track record of building recruiting processes or infrastructure rather than only maintaining existing systems
• Comfort operating with limited structure and making decisions independently
• Strong communication and the ability to partner directly with founders and senior executives
• Familiarity with modern ATS and recruiting tooling
• A data-driven approach to pipeline management and recruiting performance

For recruiting operations opportunities, deeper experience with Ashby, recruiting automation, analytics, SQL/spreadsheets, APIs/webhooks, or AI-enabled workflows is particularly valuable.

For senior GTM opportunities, experience hiring Enterprise AEs, Sales leadership, first-in-seat GTM roles, Marketing, CS, RevOps, or Partnerships is especially relevant.

For Founding Recruiter opportunities, teams care heavily about candidates who have experienced the transition from a small startup into a much larger organization and understand what it takes to build the recruiting function along the way.

The environments

These are not large-company recruiting roles with established processes, large coordination teams, and clearly defined playbooks.

• Many of the teams are specifically looking for someone who enjoys figuring out:
• What should our hiring process actually look like?
• Where should we source candidates?
• How high should our talent bar be?
• Which metrics matter?
• How should we use AI?
• Where is our recruiting funnel breaking?
• How do we compete for exceptional candidates against much larger companies?
• And then building the systems to answer those questions.

Next steps

1. Apply through this LinkedIn job post.
2. CoffeeSpace will review your background against the recruiting opportunities we're currently supporting.
3. If there’s a strong match, we’ll reach out and discuss the opportunity before making any introduction.
4. Because we're supporting multiple companies, we may also identify another recruiting or talent role that fits your background better than the one that initially brought you here.
5. Any introduction to another company will always be made with your permission.

A quick note on authenticity

These are real recruiting opportunities that CoffeeSpace is supporting through partnerships with companies actively looking for talent.

We’re using this post to reach strong recruiters within and beyond our network who may be relevant to one or more of these searches.

Rather than requiring candidates to discover every individual opportunity themselves, our goal is to understand what you’re exceptional at, what kind of company you want to join, and where there may be a strong mutual fit.