Founding Recruiter

Pocket has passed $100M ARR and 300,000+ devices sold with a very small team. We're YC W26, backed by Accel, and we've hit the point where hiring is the bottleneck.
We have 25+ roles to fill in the next two quarters across Engineering, Research, Marketing, Ops, Finance, GTM, and Support. Right now the founders run every search themselves. We want you to take that over and build how Pocket hires.
This is not an HR role and not an agency-management role. You source, you screen, you close.
Location: SF (hybrid / on-site)
Compensation: $120K–$150K + meaningful equity
Type: Full-time
Your first 90 days
Day 30: You own every open search. ATS is live, every role has a scorecard and an interview plan, and the 5 highest-priority roles have active pipelines.
Day 60: First 5+ offers signed. Founders spend time on final interviews only.
Day 90: Hiring runs on a weekly rhythm with funnel numbers. You've told us what's broken in how we hire and fixed the worst of it.
What you'll own
Full-cycle recruiting for every open role: intake, sourcing, screening, offer, close
Outbound sourcing for the hard roles, from ML researchers to a Controller, not just inbound review
Turning a founder's vague "we need someone for X" into a clear role, scorecard, and interview plan
Offers and closing, including salary and equity conversations, together with the founders
Hiring across the US, Europe, and India: full-time, contractors, and interns
The ATS, the funnel numbers, and how Pocket shows up to candidates everywhere
What we're looking for
4–6+ years of full-cycle recruiting, at least part of it in-house at a fast-growing startup
You've closed both technical and business roles, and you can show the numbers
You source every week, personally, and you're good at it
You can run 10+ searches in parallel without dropping candidates
You can tell a strong candidate from a polished one, and you'll push back on us when a role is badly defined or the bar is slipping
You can explain startup equity to a candidate clearly and honestly
Nice to have
First or early recruiter at a seed or Series A company
Experience hiring ML / speech / LLM researchers
Consumer tech, DTC, e-commerce, or hardware background
International hiring (Europe, India), EOR and contractor setups
You already use AI tools to move faster on sourcing and outreach
Why this role
You build the team of a company scaling from hundreds of thousands to millions of customers
You work directly with the founders and every team lead, with no layers in between
You define how Pocket hires. There is no legacy process to inherit
A clear path to Head of Talent / People as the function grows
Competitive salary and meaningful equity through Pocket's stock option plan
Interview process
Intro call (15 min): experience, motivation, comp expectations, location
Recruiting deep dive: your best searches, your process, your funnel numbers
Practical exercise on a real Pocket role: intake, sourcing strategy, sample outreach
Conversations with the hiring managers you'd partner with
Founders interview
References and offer
We move fast. Expect the whole process to take under two weeks.
About Pocket
Pocket is a Y Combinator W26 company building a premium hardware plus software product in the AI voice recorder space. We are obsessed with quality and speed. We are scaling fast across the US and Europe and building a device experience that can become the category leader.

Experience
3+ years

Work arrangement
Yes