Head of Talent

Hellyeah is the agentic operating system for distribution. The role owns how Hellyeah finds and wins people: starting each important search by naming who could do the job, then going to get them. Agents do much of the sourcing work, and the role owns those agents, either building them directly or driving them with engineers. The role is technical, runs searches from day one, reports to the CTO and works directly with the founders. It is onsite five days a week. It is explicitly not a recruiting ops, agency desk or people-ops job; payroll, benefits and HR policy are owned by others.

Responsibilities

Scope the search: agree a ranked list of skills and experience with the hiring manager before talking to candidates; push back on vague, mis-leveled or not-worth-opening roles; decide which searches to run yourself and which go to agencies or contractors. Map the market: build lists of people who could do each priority role; work teammates' and your own networks until the same names return; run referrals as a system. Win them: find the right warm intro and keep the conversation going for weeks or months; build each process around the candidate; learn what motivates them and close, handle competing offers, and stay in touch until their first day; look after people you don't hire. Own the hiring agents: set the rules for what each agent does and may never do without a person; debug agent runs by reading logs and code; build or drive the build of agent changes with engineers and coding agents; point agents at the best people and measure them on hires produced. Run the system: keep evaluation honest with work samples, AI-open assessments and paid work trials; train interviewers and get decisions within a day of the last interview; record the source of each hire and give founders and hiring managers visibility into each search; work with founders on public writing and events.

Requirements

A record of your own hires, most of them senior and in engineering, research or AI; You've personally closed senior people who weren't looking and had stronger-looking options; You've mapped a market by hand and can show how a list of names turned into hires; You've scoped roles with hiring managers and changed what they were hiring for; You've put recruiting automation into live use, either by building it yourself or by driving it with engineers; You finish what you start without being chased, and the founders you've worked with will say so; A strong network in San Francisco or Shanghai, and a real plan for reaching the other market; Technical depth: you can read code and logs, debug a failed agent run with an engineer, and hold a conversation a senior engineer enjoys; Specs that engineers or coding agents can build from, and the habit of testing what comes back; Curiosity about the business: you can explain how a given hire changes our growth; Offer craft: equity, competing offers, and what people in your market expect; Daily use of coding agents, plus clear views on what agents should not do to candidates; The confidence to tell a founder no and explain why; Experience carrying several live searches at once, knowing where your work starts to slip, and still treating candidates with care; Written English for daily work with teammates in the US, China and India; Working Chinese for the Shanghai seat

Nice to have

You've built a recruiting function from scratch at a fast-growing startup; Executive search experience; You've hired in both San Francisco and Shanghai; You've worked as an engineer or run technical screens; You've designed work samples or paid work trials; Clay, ATS APIs or similar tools you've extended; Chinese, for the San Francisco seat