Head of Talent
TLDR
Shape the entire recruiting function as the first talent hire, working closely with founders to create a team that defines the company's culture and trajectory.
Viktor is the AI coworker. It lives in Slack and Microsoft Teams, connects to thousands of tools, and does real work for real companies: finance, marketing, ops, engineering. We're building the product that replaces half the SaaS stack with a single teammate.
The team is small. The scope is not.
The Short Version
You're the person who walks into a room and immediately knows who matters. You remember names, you remember what motivates people, and you know when to call instead of email. You're equal parts strategist and closer. You get people. You also get business.
What's Actually Going On Here
The constraint isn't ideas or money. It's people. Every week without the right engineer in the right seat is a week we're slower than we should be. We need someone who takes that personally.
You'll be our first talent hire. No team to inherit. No playbook to open. No "recruiting coordinator" buffer between you and the work. You report to the founders. Directly. You build the entire function: how we find people, how we evaluate them, how we get the best ones to say yes when they have six other offers.
What You'll Actually Do
Own the full cycle. Sourcing, screening, closing, offer negotiation. Every step is yours. Later you'll hire a team. Right now, you are the team.
Build the process. We have Ashby. You have opinions about how to use it. Interview loops, scorecards, employer brand, candidate experience. Most of this doesn't exist yet. You decide what good looks like, then build the system that produces it consistently.
Find the right engineers. People with real systems thinking, AI depth, and the kind of care that shows up in their work. They're not on job boards. You know that. You probably already know some of them.
Close well. The real job is getting good people to pick a company they haven't heard of over the names already in their inbox. You'll need to tell our story clearly. It helps that the story is true.
Be our person in New York. First hire in the city. You're shaping what Zeta Labs feels like in the US, not just who's on the roster.
Work shoulder-to-shoulder with the founders. Fryderyk (CEO) and Peter (CTO) are deeply in the weeds on hiring. They care about every senior hire. You'll shape profiles together, run closing calls together, and disagree productively when you see things differently. They want someone with conviction, not someone who nods.
How You'll Know It's Working
There's always someone worth talking to next week. The pipeline doesn't go cold.
Senior candidates say yes. Not because we overpay. Because the process was sharp, the team was impressive, and the pitch was honest.
The founders stop sourcing on their own. Not because they lost interest, but because you're better at it than they are.
New hires show up on day one and think "this team is even stronger than I expected."
People in the market start hearing about Viktor through you, not just through the product.
Who You Are
5+ years in talent/recruiting, with at least 2 years focused on engineering hiring at high-growth startups or top tech companies.
Exceptional sourcer. You don't wait for inbound. You find the best people, build relationships, and close them — especially passive candidates.
Technical fluency. You don't need to code, but you need to speak the language well enough to evaluate engineering talent and earn their respect.
Founder mentality. You're building a function, not inheriting one. You thrive with ambiguity, move fast, and figure things out.
NYC-based. This role is in-person. You'll be our first hire in New York and help shape what the US team looks like.
Why This Role Is Different
No layers. No recruiting manager above you. No head of people you report to. This is your function. You own it.
The hires you make will define the company. We're early enough that the next 20 people shape the culture, the product, and the trajectory. You're not filling reqs. You're building the team.
The product makes the pitch easier. The engineers you're recruiting will build AI agents that do real work for real businesses. That's a better story than most companies can offer.
Talent strategy is company strategy. The founders already believe this. You won't spend your first six months convincing anyone that hiring matters.
Even Better If
You've hired for AI/ML or agent-focused engineering teams and understand what that market actually looks like right now.
You've built a recruiting function at a company that went from 20 to 100+ people. You know what breaks and when to fix it before it does.
You've worked at a company where the CEO was deeply involved in hiring and you loved it, not tolerated it.
How we work
Small team, high trust, low process. Decisions are made by owners, not committees. You will ship your first week. You will talk to users your first day. We don't do alignment meetings or stakeholder syncs. We build things, see if they work, and iterate.
Everyone here owns something real. Not a task. A surface of the company that customers depend on. When it breaks, you fix it. When it wins, everyone knows whose work it was.
We use Viktor to build Viktor. You'll see what you're working on in action every day.
Why Viktor
This is a rare window. The product works. The market is pulling. The team is small enough that what you do next week will be live in production next week. That doesn't last forever. Right now, it's still true.
Compensation
Competitive salary, meaningful equity, and the kind of ownership that only exists at this stage.
We're in Munich, New York, and Warsaw. Onsite preferred. The best work happens when you're in the room.