Head of Talent (Founding)

About the role

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.

Responsibilities

• 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

• Fo

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