Director: Talent and Culture

Your Role

As Director: Talent & Culture, you’ll be the architect of how talent shows up at Sentient, designing and owning our hiring engine, culture-building practices, and performance infrastructure from the ground up. This is a hands-on, high-impact role ideal for a talent operator who can both recruit world-class technical talent and build the systems that help them thrive.

You’ll work directly with the cofounders and early team to shape how Sentient grows, setting the bar for who we hire, how we collaborate, and what it means to build a generational company in a frontier space. You should be excited to move quickly, iterate often, and drive quality and cultural integrity at every touchpoint.

Your Responsibilities

• Own full-cycle recruiting across technical, research, and operational roles, from sourcing to closing.

• Design and implement scalable hiring processes, tools, and candidate experiences aligned with our mission and values.

• Partner with founders and team leads to define hiring plans, role design, and organizational structure.

• Build and embed foundational culture practices, including onboarding, rituals, internal comms, and team norms.

• Develop and maintain lightweight performance and feedback systems to support high trust and high autonomy.

• Track key hiring and people metrics to drive continuous improvement and hiring efficiency.

• Support leadership with org design, compensation planning, leveling frameworks, and succession planning.

• Champion diversity, transparency, and long-term thinking across all talent-related decisions.

What You’ll Need

• 6–10 years of experience across recruiting, talent operations, or people leadership, ideally in early-stage startups.

• Proven success hiring for hard-to-fill technical and leadership roles in high-velocity environments.

• Strong operational ability with experience implementing systems for performance, leveling, and development.

• Exceptional stakeholder management skills and the ability to influence cross-functional leadership.

• Systems thinker with the ability to turn ambiguity into structure and move from zero to one.

• Deep alignment with Sentient’s mission and a high-integrity approach to organizational building.

Preferred

• Background in AI, frontier tech, or open-source ecosystems.

• Experience working in remote-first, distributed, or asynchronous teams.

• Familiarity with tools like Greenhouse, Ashby, Lattice, or similar platforms.

• Prior experience designing or implementing equity, compensation, or incentive systems.

• Passion for decentralization, open collaboration, and building durable organizations.