Principal Talent Partner, US Hiring Lead (Contract-to-Perm)

Location: Mountain View, CA. Three days a week onsite.

Type: Initial three-month contract with a clear, fast path to permanent.

Compensation: $150,000 to $200,000 annualised equivalent, depending on experience.

Equity: Available on conversion to permanent.

About Us

We’re an embedded talent consultancy on a mission to evolve how businesses recruit. Our clients include some of the most innovative organisations in the world — from Google-backed unicorns to Fintech and SaaS scale-ups reshaping their industries.

Our team spans the UK, Germany, Spain, South Africa, and Vietnam. We’re remote-first, globally minded, and deeply collaborative. We believe hiring should be human-centred, data-informed, and impact-driven — creating better outcomes for companies and candidates alike.

Why This Role Exists

As a Principal Talent Partner, you’ll play a pivotal role in building world-class technical and product teams for some of the fastest-growing tech companies.

Embedded directly within a client, we have been brought in to lead and accelerate US hiring for a VC-backed, hyper-growth technology company building category-defining products out of Mountain View. They have scaled more than 6x in two years, they are doubling their US team this year, and recruiting is now the constraint on how fast they grow.

This is the Founding recruiting seat on the ground in the US. You own it. You report into a founder-led leadership team that cares deeply about hiring, and you set the standard for how recruiting runs across the US business.

Supported by a squad of sourcing and delivery specialists, you’ll combine deep technical curiosity with consultative partnership and a delivery-first mindset.

In your first twelve months you will

• Own all US hiring as the lead recruiter on the ground: around 30 roles, the majority technical, alongside senior leadership and executive searches.
• Bring time-to-hire down from over 100 days, lift offer acceptance, and build pipelines that do not depend on inbound, because inbound is not enough at this level and you will source the talent yourself.
• Build the US recruiting function from the ground: the process, the systems, the bar.
• Earn the leadership team's confidence in hiring back, so the founders get their time returned.

What You’ll Do

• Run full-cycle, sourcing-led recruiting and build the pipelines.
• Defend the bar with data and push back when a search is not scoped to win, including with senior stakeholders who would rather wait.
• Work directly with founders and the executive team.
• Bring an AI-native way of working: you build and experiment with AI tools, you design workflows that make recruiting faster and sharper, and you teach others to do the same.
• Own the numbers that matter: pipeline velocity, offer acceptance, and time to hire, without dropping the quality bar.
• Lift the standard around you.

What You’ll Bring

• Senior, principal, or founding-recruiter experience at a startup or scale-up in a genuine high-growth phase. You have owned outcomes, not handed off candidates.
• Proven experience recruiting for Engineering, Data, or Product roles within tech scale-ups or high-growth environments with real exposure to leadership and executive hiring.
• Strong understanding of technical hiring landscapes — from modern engineering stacks to data and product org design.
• Executive presence and resilience. You back yourself, you push back when a search is not scoped to win, and you can carry a room with founders.
• AI fluency that goes well beyond prompting for the odd email. You have built workflows, reports, or systems that change how recruiting runs.
• A track record of building or improving a recruiting function or system, not just contributing to one.
• Comfort operating with autonomy and speed, including making the call in the moment when a hire is on the line.
• US-based and able to be in Mountain View three days a week.

Nice to have

• A technical educational background, for example computer science, that lets you hold credible conversations with technical candidates.
• Experience with a modern ATS (Ashby a plus) and interview-intelligence tools such as Metaview. We care more about the instinct to use tools well than the specific logos.

This is probably not for you if

You have spent your career inside large, process-driven organisations where the systems were built for you and the brand did the selling. This seat has no playbook waiting and no inbound to lean on. You build it.