Founding Head of Talent

Qualitate is building the AI-native primary intelligence platform for enterprises, investment firms, and asset managers. We automate the entire primary research workflow, from study design and expert recruitment through AI-moderated interviews and insight synthesis - replacing weeks of manual research with hours of high-signal output.

Expert research is a broken industry dominated by legacy incumbents with expensive, manual, and slow services. Investment and corporate strategy teams spend hundreds of hours coordinating intermediaries, scheduling expert calls, and synthesizing insights across fragmented providers. The process takes weeks to produce short-lived intelligence.

Qualitate transforms this workflow by autonomously conducting expert discussions at scale using AI. Qualitate’s AI Moderator interviews thousands of experts simultaneously each month, capturing forward-looking purchasing plans, competitive displacement, and real-time ROI signals. The platform turns these interviews into quantified, time-series outputs tracking over 10,000 public and private companies, queryable instantly in natural language.

Our customers include some of the world’s largest enterprises, hedge funds, PE firms, credit investors, and venture capital firms. We’re growing fast, and this is the first dedicated recruiting hire at Qualitate.

You’ll own the entire hiring engine from day one: finding candidates, running processes, and helping us grow from ~25 people to 50+ by end of 2026. You’ll get the chance to build our recruiting engine from scratch, hiring across every function – engineering, go-to-market, operations, and beyond. You’ll source a mix of individual contributors and managers. The right person for this role context-switches across very different candidate profiles while still moving with the urgency of an early-stage company.

• Sourcing. You’ll spend nearly half your time building candidate pipeline from scratch. You’ll use AI tools, LinkedIn Recruiter, your network, niche communities, and creative outbound channels.

• Candidate engagement. Screening calls, managing interview loops, selling candidates on Qualitate, and converting offers to close. You’ll be the face of the company for every candidate who enters the funnel.

• Recruiting operations. You’ll own and refine our ATS (Ashby), build candidate scorecards, establish reporting cadences, and create the infrastructure needed to hire at pace without chaos.

• Stakeholder partnership. Feed hiring insights back to leadership. Your market signal directly shapes our compensation strategy, employer brand, and organizational design.

• Build the playbook. Help build the recruiting playbook. As part of our founding operations team, you’ll define the interview process, offer frameworks, and onboarding workflow for every function.

• At least 3–7+ years of full-cycle recruiting experience. You’ve sourced, screened, closed, and done it at volume.

• Startup or high-growth company background required. You’ve recruited in environments where there’s no playbook, no employer brand, and no admin support – and you thrived in it.

• Cross-functional range. You can recruit for a VP of Sales on Monday and a backend engineer on Wednesday. You may lean toward one area, but can adapt and learn other areas.

• Sourcing as a craft. You take pride in creative recruiting outbound. You don’t wait for inbound flow. You know how to write messages that actually get responses.

• Operator mindset. You think about recruiting as a system, not just a set of conversations. You’ll want to build dashboards, track conversion rates, and know your pipeline metrics cold.

• High ownership, low ego. You’ll have a lot of autonomy, but you need to be someone who communicates proactively, flags problems early, and doesn’t need to be managed closely.

• Prior experience recruiting for a technology startup.

• You’ve been early on the recruiting team at a company and helped build the function.

• Experience building out an ATS, building structured interview processes, and establishing recruiting metrics from scratch.

• Bonus if you have existing relationships with strong candidates in engineering, sales, or operations roles in NYC.

• Bonus if you have experience using Ashby ATS

• A functioning sourcing machine across 3–5 active roles.

• Refine our ATS and build enough process to scale recruiting while not slowing us down

• A candidate pipeline with measurable weekly throughput.

• Relationships with hiring managers across every function.

• A clear picture of developing Qualitate’s employer brand

• Base salary: $150K–$230K depending on experience. Eligible for additional performance bonus.

• Equity: Meaningful early-stage grant with upside tied to company growth.

• Benefits: Health coverage, flexible PTO, paid holidays.

• Location: Full-time, in-person in New York City.

• Excellence. You’ll be held accountable to an exceptionally high bar and impact

• High velocity. Fast paced work environment in terms of growth, decision making, and time to impact

• High agency. Ownership over how you work, not just what you work on. We hire people we trust to figure it out.

• A builder’s mindset. You'll create the processes, playbooks, and systems that define how this company scales.

• Shared ambition. A small, early team disrupting the multi-billion dollar market research industry with AI.

• Joy. We work hard and genuinely enjoy working with each other. Dedication to our work is matched only by our passion for fostering an enjoyable, collaborative work environment.