Founding Talent Partner

Frontline work keeps the world running. Restaurants, hospitals, schools, nurseries, airlines, stores, emergency services. Together they employ 80% of the global workforce, over 3 billion people, and they're among the hardest businesses anywhere to run. By-the-minute scheduling, HR and payroll make them far more operationally complex than the average office, yet just 1% of venture funding has ever gone to software built for them.

Rising costs, wage increases, labor shortages and tighter regulation have made fixing that urgent. Sona is the AI-native workforce management platform for frontline organizations, with agents that match staffing to real demand and take the admin load off managers. That's a $500bn+ market the software industry has mostly walked past.

We've raised over $100M from N47, Felicis, Gradient and Northzone, signed more than 100 enterprise customers across the UK and US, and opened offices in London, New York, Austin and Lisbon. More on working at Sona here https://www.sona.ai/careers.

About the Role

As our founding US teams in New York, San Francisco and Austin begin to scale, we're hiring a Talent Partner to build out the US hiring function. You'll be the first dedicated Talent hire in the region, owning how we attract and assess US talent and laying the foundation for our entire US operation.

This role reports into the Head of Talent, based in the UK. You'll work closely with our VP of North America Sales and other key leaders based in our San Francisco office. Our US story is early but proven: we've got customers signed, leadership in place, and real momentum, and now it needs scaling.

That means high ownership and the freedom to build, but it also means ambiguity, a fast pace, and priorities that shift as the business moves. This role isn't for everyone. If you need a fixed playbook and a settled environment, it won't suit. If building one from scratch is the part that excites you, you'll thrive here.

Responsibilities

• Own hiring for US-based roles end to end, across our New York, San Francisco and Austin hubs, from kickoff and briefing through sourcing, interviewing, and offer to signed contract

• Hire primarily go-to-market roles (sales, marketing), with some Customer and other roles as the team grows

• Lay the foundations of the US talent and people function as we scale: employer brand, process, ways of working, and ad-hoc people operations

• Innovate using AI to improve the speed and quality of hiring at Sona

Requirements

• An experienced full-lifecycle recruiter, able to support and own end-to-end hiring independently in a high-ambiguity environment

• A specialist in hiring go-to-market talent into high-bar, fast-moving organisations, who understands what separates a strong hire from an average one

• A strong sourcer, for whom building an outbound pipeline is a standard part of their rhythm

• Data-driven and comfortable owning a funnel, using the numbers to troubleshoot, advise, and forecast

• An advanced user of AI tools to improve the speed, efficiency, and quality of hiring

• Experience in VC-backed enterprise AI/SaaS preferred

Benefits

• Salary: $175,000 - $200,000

• Hybrid: San Francisco, minimum 3 days a week

• Share options

• 20 days PTO + sick days

• 401k contributions, employer match up to 2%

• Comprehensive health cover via Aetna

• Enhanced parental leave & pay

• Annual all expenses paid team retreats

• The latest Macbook and equipment budget for your home office

• Professional development budget

• Unlimited free books

Note: this represents a typical benefits package for a US-based, full-time employee. Exact details may vary based on location and employment type but we try to be as fair as possible to all of our team members. Please ask your contact in the Talent team to clarify the available benefits for you.