Talent Lead

At Lapel, we believe the most hospitable companies win. We're building the data, infrastructure, and tools that help customer-facing teams understand every customer and act on that insight at scale throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

Most internet businesses want to treat customers well, but their tools work against them. We’re building the layer that makes every interaction feel personal again: unifying context, coordinating action, and closing the gap between intent and experience.

It’s a technically ambitious challenge spanning data infrastructure, AI, and systems design – with a deeply human outcome: helping software companies serve people better. We call it hospitality at scale.

We’re well-funded, backed by top-tier investors, and already working with exceptional companies, from fast-growing startups to large enterprises. We’ll share more details when we talk.

About This Role

We believe people are our most significant competitive advantage, and building out our talent function is one of the most critical initiatives happening at Lapel.

You'll own it end-to-end: building pipelines for technical and non-technical roles, calibrating what great looks like across functions, and making sure every candidate experiences a process that reflects how much we care about every detail. This role sits close to the founders and shapes what Lapel becomes.

What You'll Do

• Build and maintain a high-quality candidate pipeline across all open positions

• Streamline and evolve our existing hiring process to raise the bar on speed and quality

• Own and continuously improve our recruiting infrastructure, including Ashby, our ATS

• Partner closely with founders and hiring managers to define role requirements and candidate profiles

• Drive a consistent, high-touch candidate experience from first contact to offer

• Develop creative sourcing strategies to reduce reliance on inbound and expand our reach

• Maintain and improve how we evaluate and calibrate on candidates across the team

• Support the broader people function, including compensation benchmarking, HR systems, and the infrastructure that keeps the team running smoothly

• Establish and grow Lapel’s talent brand within the Bay Area tech community

You'll Thrive in This Role If You

• Have 4+ years of recruiting experience across both technical and non-technical roles

• Have owned hiring in a fast-paced startup environment

• Are a strong judge of talent and can calibrate quickly across different functions

• Know how to source creatively and engage with passive candidates

• Have strong opinions on what a great hiring process looks like and can execute against them

• Are comfortable working directly with founders with high ownership and low oversight

• Move fast without letting candidate experience slip

The Process

We aim to hire with intention, respect your time, and offer feedback along the way.

1. Initial conversation (20 minutes) We’ll explore your motivations, share what we’re building, and answer your questions.

2. In-depth interview (60 minutes) We’ll go deeper into your craft and experience. No prep work necessary.

3. Take-home project (2–4 hours) You’ll complete a short, well-scoped exercise that mirrors the kind of work you’d do here.

4. On-site visit (1–2 days) Join us in the office to review your take-home, grab lunch, and work on something real.

Compensation and Benefits

We believe great people build great companies – and we invest accordingly.

• Competitive salary + meaningful early-stage equity

• Full benefits: medical, dental, vision, 401(k), and commuter benefits

• Generous time off: many company holidays and coordinated team-wide breaks throughout the year to focus and recharge

• Office perks: lunch and dinner provided daily, in-office snacks, and health & wellness benefits

• Team culture: regular off-sites, tight feedback loops, and a bias toward action

Why Lapel, Why Now

1. A trillion-dollar problem hiding in plain sight. Companies spend over $1T a year on customer-facing teams and $150B on the tools meant to support them, yet every team still pieces context together across a dozen disconnected systems. We're rebuilding this from the foundation, and AI makes now the only moment it's possible.

2. The most interesting place to apply AI is where the work actually happens. Customer operations is one of the largest, most under-built surfaces in software. Every company runs on it, every team feels the pain, and the tools haven't been seriously reimagined in fifteen years. We think the next generation of category-defining B2B companies will be built here.

3. One platform, every customer-facing team. Sales, success, support, and ops all serve the same customer relationship, but each one buys a different tool to do it. Owning the foundation means the surface area grows with the company, from a single team to the entire revenue org to the whole business. That's the market, and the mission: better service at internet scale.

Lapel works in person in San Francisco, five days a week, at our office on Market Street. We hire people who'd be restless anywhere else.

Other notices

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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