VP of Talent

About the role

As VP of Talent, you own recruiting across the company: pipeline strategy, outbound sourcing, and the candidate experience. Most hiring is outbound and spans technical and non‑technical talent (Finance, Business Ops, Power Systems, Supply Chain, Project Delivery, and Engineering). You will partner with founders and technical leaders to define precise profiles and build a pipeline that fuels hyper‑growth at TAR. This senior player‑coach seat is based in Austin; you will inherit and shape a team of FLC recruiters while building the function and its tooling.

Responsibilities

• Own active and passive pipeline strategy and talent market research across every function to prevent bottlenecks.
• Partner with founders and functional leaders to define candidate profiles for technical and leadership roles and align hiring standards.
• Run and improve the end‑to‑end recruiting process in Ashby, from intake and sourcing through screens, on‑sites, and offers, keeping time‑to‑hire low.
• Source and close hard‑to‑fill technical and executive candidates through precise written outreach and founder‑quality pitching.
• Develop and track recruiting KPIs such as time‑to‑hire and passthrough rates; conduct pipeline reviews with hiring managers.
• Own the employer brand and candidate story, pitching TAR compellingly to passive and executive candidates.
• Maintain compensation and equity benchmarks to guide offer design and close candidates.
• Build the talent function over time (tooling, playbooks, and eventually the team) and coordinate with People and Operations on onboarding and start‑date velocity.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in talent acquisition, technical, or executive recruiting.
• 2+ years of management experience.
• Proven outbound sourcing and closing of hard‑to‑fill technical and leadership roles.
• Track record of managing executive and C‑suite stakeholders and holding your own in profile and bar‑setting debates.
• Experience owning an ATS end‑to‑end, ideally Ashby.
• Ability to learn new technical domains quickly and translate them into precise candidate profiles and search strategies.
• Player‑coach mindset: able to jump in on individual candidates while setting strategy and building a team over time.
• Excellent written outreach and the ability to pitch a company like a founder.
• Nice to have: founding or first recruiter experience at a hard‑tech, energy, defense, or deep‑tech company (e.g., Anduril, SpaceX, Tesla) building the function from scratch.
• Nice to have: experience hiring power systems, controls, hardware, or infrastructure engineers.
• Nice to have: experience recruiting across multiple offices of a distributed team.
• Nice to have: experience scaling headcount through hypergrowth (e.g., from 50 to 500 people).

Benefits

• Up to $15K relocation bonus
• Unlimited PTO
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• $1,000 monthly stipend for meals