
Founding Recruiter
Required skills
- Founding Recruiter
- hiring engine
- headcount planning
- leveling
- compensation
- market conditions
- candidate expectations
- competitive offers
- employer brand
- referral programs
Nice to have
- insights
- AI-native companies
- GTM leadership hiring
- Head of Sales
- VP Customer Success
- GTM talent
Role summary
Strella is seeking its first Founding Recruiter to build and own the end-to-end hiring process for its AI-driven market research platform. This role will focus on full-cycle recruiting, primarily for Go-to-Market and Engineering roles, and will be responsible for sourcing, building pipelines, and developing the company's recruiting playbook from scratch. The ideal candidate has 4-8 years of recruiting experience, including at least 2 years in-house at a venture-backed B2B SaaS or AI company, with a proven track record of closing GTM hires and experience as an early recruiter in a startup environment. This is a remote, full-time opportunity with significant impact and equity.
About StrellaStrella is reimagining market research with AI. Our platform conducts in-depth, AI-moderated interviews and transforms customer conversations into actionable insights in a fraction of the time of traditional research.
We’re building a new model for market research that combines the speed and scale of AI with the strategic expertise of world-class researchers. Our mission is to make high-quality customer understanding faster, more accessible, and more impactful for every business.
We're growing our go-to-market team fast. We're hiring a Customer Success Lead, a Business Development Representative and a Product Marketing Manager now, and more roles will follow. We're looking for our first Internal Recruiter to own hiring end to end. You'll build the recruiting engine and help shape the team that takes Strella to market.
Company Highlights
Explosive Growth: We’ve more than quadrupled our annual recurring revenue over the past year, demonstrating strong demand for a fundamentally better way to conduct research.
Enterprise Traction: Trusted by leading brands including J.Crew, Chobani, DraftKings, and to uncover customer insights and inform critical business decisions.
Strong Investor Backing: Raised capital from Bessemer Venture Partners to accelerate our mission of transforming the market research industry.
Massive Market Opportunity: We’re bringing AI-native technology to a $100B+ global insights industry, replacing slow, expensive research processes with a faster, more scalable approach.
Building the Future of Research: We’re expanding beyond software into a new model of full-service insights, combining AI-powered research with expert-led strategy. You’ll be among the earliest hires helping shape this offering.
What You'll DoOwn Full-Cycle Hiring
Run searches from intake to signed offer across Go-to-Market (e.g., Customer Success, Sales, Marketing) and Engineering
Work with hiring managers to define each role, its scorecard and its interview plan before the first candidate is sourced.
Close candidates by selling a company they may not know yet, using our story, our traction and the equity opportunity.
Build the Pipeline
Source most of your pipeline through outbound: LinkedIn Recruiter, Clay and sequencing tools, referrals and your own network.
Keep a warm bench of talent so we can move fast when the next role opens.
Evaluate candidates on substance, including quota attainment, deal size, sales motion and retention outcomes.
Build the Recruiting Playbook
Build our hiring process from scratch: structured interviews, scorecards, take-home exercises, debriefs and offer approvals.
Own the ATS (Ashby) and reporting on time-to-fill, pass-through rates and source quality.
Make every candidate's experience fast, organized and personal, so our process becomes a selling point.
Partner With Leadership
Work directly with our founders and GTM leaders on headcount planning, leveling and compensation.
Advise hiring managers on market conditions, candidate expectations and how to win competitive offers.
Help define how Strella recruits as we grow, including employer brand, referral programs and eventually technical hiring.
Who You AreHigh Impact Attributes
Builder: You've built recruiting processes where none existed and you like the blank page.
Hunter: You source proactively and don't wait for inbound.
Commercially minded: You understand how GTM teams work and can tell a strong AE from someone who rode a hot market.
People-centric: Candidates and hiring managers trust you, and you care about getting the hire right, not just filling the seat.
Hungry and humble: You move fast, own outcomes and roll up your sleeves.
Experience
4–8 years of recruiting experience, with at least 2 years in-house at a venture-backed B2B SaaS or AI company.
A track record of closing GTM hires such as AEs, SDRs/BDRs, CSMs, solutions engineers and marketers, ideally 15+ a year.
Experience as an early or founding recruiter at a Seed to Series C startup, or helping a team scale through hypergrowth.
Fluency with modern sourcing tools such as LinkedIn Recruiter, Clay, Gem or similar, and an ATS such as Ashby.
Nice to Have
Experience recruiting for research, insights or AI-native companies.
GTM leadership hiring (Head of Sales, VP Customer Success).
An existing network of GTM talent in New York.
Why Join Strella
Build the function: You'll be our first dedicated recruiter, with a clear path to Head of Talent as the team grows.
Direct impact: Work side by side with the founders and GTM leaders, and see your hires shape the company.
Competitive package: Competitive compensation, meaningful equity and comprehensive benefits.
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