Head of Talent (Founding) at Startale Labs

<h2 id="about-us" class="code-line" data-line="2">About Us</h2> <p class="code-line" data-line="4">In partnership with <strong>Sony and SBI</strong> — two of Japan's largest companies — we are building the infrastructure to bring the world's assets on-chain: <strong>Strium</strong>, a next-generation DeFi L1 powered by a fully on-chain orderbook exchange, and <strong>Startale App</strong>, a consumer super-app. Distributed across Tokyo, New York, and Singapore; English-operating; built to a world-class standard.</p> <h2 id="position-overview" class="code-line" data-line="6">Position Overview</h2> <p class="code-line" data-line="8">There are engineers in your head right now — people you could message on Monday who would actually reply — because you invested in those relationships for years, long before you needed them. You've closed Staff- and Director-level engineers who weren't looking, for companies they'd never heard of, with no famous logo doing the convincing for you. And you've done it in more than one world: you can walk into a domain that isn't yours, earn credibility, and build a live pipeline from nothing.</p> <p class="code-line" data-line="10">If that's you, read on. If your hires came from inbound, job boards, or agency hand-offs — or if your strength is being <em>known</em> in one community rather than <em>closing</em> hard candidates — this isn't your seat. We're hiring the person engineers say yes to, not the person engineers have heard of.</p> <p class="code-line" data-line="12">We're looking for a <strong>founding Head of Talent</strong> to build our hiring engine from zero. A CV-screening AI is already live; you start from a working component, not a blank page. You will not inherit a playbook — you will write it.</p> <h2 id="what-the-first-months-demand" class="code-line" data-line="14">What the First Months Demand</h2> <p class="code-line" data-line="16">Our engineering team is small and early. We can't yet lean on internal referrals, and we don't have a consumer brand that makes great engineers apply on their own. So your first job is not to build a funnel and wait — it's to reach into relationships you already have and <strong>land our first elite engineers in weeks, not quarters</strong>. Those hires become the seed the rest of the engine grows from.</p> <p class="code-line" data-line="18">Then you prove it wasn't one lucky rolodex. You do it again in <strong>Striu