Position: Founding Recruiter

Location: Gurgaon

Working Days: Monday to Friday

Experience Required: 6+ years

FOUNDING RECRUITER

This is not a recruiting job. This is a company-building job, and on most days it will feel like both the most exciting and most demanding thing you have ever done. Sometimes in the same hour.

We are a deep-tech startup working at the intersection of neuroscience, longevity, and consumer hardware. We are building something that has never been built before, and to do that we need people who have never existed in a talent pool before. Computational neuroscientists who also train like athletes. Neural decoding researchers who obsess over product. Embedded engineers who wear what they build and hate it until it is perfect. BCI engineers who think in milliseconds and ship in sprints.

Here is the honest truth: many of these people are not on LinkedIn. Some of them do not have resumes. A few of them do not think of themselves as candidates at all. They think of themselves as researchers, or athletes, or obsessives who happen to have a PhD. Finding them will require you to go where no recruiter has gone before: into academic forums, niche Discord servers, competitive athletic communities, university lab networks, and conference corridors. If your instinct when a search goes cold is to repost the job description, this role will break you. If your instinct is to think laterally and get creative, this role will define you.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

You will build our talent function from absolute zero. No inherited pipelines, no existing vendor relationships, no team beneath you, at least not yet. In the early days, you are the sourcer, the recruiter, the scheduler, the employer brand, the offer negotiator, and the onboarding coordinator. You will do things that do not feel like recruiting: attending niche scientific conferences, cold-messaging PhD candidates mid-dissertation, reaching out to athletes who happen to have engineering degrees. You will develop sourcing strategies that have no template, because the roles you are filling have no precedent.

Specifically, you will:





- Run full-cycle recruitment across hardware engineering, neuroscience research, embedded systems, AI/ML, sensor algorithms, and beyond
- Build our presence in communities where we are currently unknown and make working here feel like the most interesting decision a brilliant person could make
- Develop unconventional sourcing strategies across academic labs, athlete-engineer crossover communities, and competitive research institutions
- Create the processes, candidate experience, and hiring philosophy that will scale with us as we grow
- Work directly with the founder, someone who moves fast, holds very high standards, and will push you to think bigger than you are used to

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

You have 6 or more years of recruiting experience, with significant time spent hiring for deeply technical or research-heavy roles in hardware, deep-tech, biotech, neuroscience, or similar fields. You have closed candidates who had no reason to take a risk on an unknown name except that you made the mission feel undeniable.

You have hired people who were hard to categorise. Maybe you once built a talent pipeline inside a Reddit thread, or found your best engineering hire through a marathon running group, or convinced a tenured researcher to leave academia by showing up at their lab in person. You do not wait for candidates to come to you. You architect the conditions under which they find you interesting.

You are not a coordinator. You are a builder with taste and a hunter with instincts. You have operated in environments where the playbook did not exist and you wrote it yourself, and you actually enjoyed that part. You are comfortable sitting across from a founder who is unconventional, intellectually restless, and holds unusually high standards.



You do not just keep up. You push back when you need to.

Beyond that, you:

- Read obsessively and understand the domains you hire for well enough to have a real conversation with a neuroscientist or hardware engineer, not just scan their resume
- Are allergic to mediocrity in your own work
- Have probably hired people who went on to build remarkable things, and feel quietly proud of that
- Are deeply human in how you engage with candidates, because you understand that the best people have options and that genuine curiosity and intellectual respect are what make them choose you

WHY THIS ROLE

You will grow faster here than any Head of Talent role at a funded startup would allow. You will have the founder's ear, a seat at the table from day one, and the kind of ownership over a function that most recruiters spend a decade trying to earn. The people you bring in will shape what this company becomes, and you will know that, and feel it, every single day.

The talent challenges here are genuinely unlike anything in a conventional recruiting career. You are not filling roles. You are assembling a team that is attempting to change how the world understands the ageing brain. That is not a small thing to be part of.

The difficulty is the point. The days when the search feels impossible, when the candidate pool seems to not exist, when you have to invent a new approach from scratch , those are the days that will make you a fundamentally better recruiter than you are today. The reward here is not just skilled recognition or equity, though both are real. It is the compounding growth that only comes from being thrown into the deep end of something genuinely hard, with a founder who believes in figuring things out.

If you are currently optimising ATS workflows at a large company and that is what you love, this is not your role. But if you have been waiting for a problem interesting enough to justify the chaos, and you are the kind of person who gets energised rather than overwhelmed when there is no map, we should talk.

📌 Founding Recruiter (India)
🏢 PinnacleU
📍 India