Head of Talent

About Wispr

We're building the first voice interface a billion people use every day.

Our first product, Flow, lets you talk instead of type anywhere on your computer or phone, and turns messy speech into polished text that is ready to send. It's scaled from $2M → $50M in ARR in under 12 months with millions of users and thousands of enterprise customers. How we think →

The team is still small enough that every person shapes what gets built.

The role

This is a player-coach role from day one. You'll build the talent infrastructure from the ground up while personally sourcing and closing candidates yourself. You'll report to the founders, sit in on every leadership hire, and hire your own recruiting team as you go.

Your own work is also made of the thing we sell. A recruiter's day is conversations: pitches, screens, debriefs, follow-ups, notes. Wispr Flow turns all of that into finished work. You'll use the product on the job every day, your feedback will shape the roadmap, and every candidate will watch you use the thing they're being recruited to build.

In practice, you'll:

• Personally source and close top talent: a researcher happy at a frontier lab, a former founder, the first sales leader you'll pull out of a company where they're already winning. You'll also build the sourcing engine that finds people like them at scale.

• Build a phenomenal recruiting infrastructure. Create a workflow where decisions happen on the call or within a day, so no candidate gets dropped and no req stalls. Run it like an operator, tracking pass-through by stage, source mix, time to offer, offer-accept, and forecasting so you catch bottlenecks before they become problems.

• Stand up interviewer and hiring-manager training, real scorecards, and calibrated bars across ML research, product engineering, sales, marketing, and G&A, so the loop holds up whether it's your 50th hire or your 200th. Coach hiring managers to interview well, and give the founders the hard truths about their own process when they need to hear them.

• Design a seven-star candidate experience, built with the same care our designers put into the first five minutes of Wispr Flow. People should feel understood, and even those we turn down should tell their friends how it felt.

• Hire recruiters to your own bar. Build a team that’s a force multiplier of the Wispr talent flywheel.

• Build and design real automation. Bring efficiencies into how the team works, much of it with our engineers down the hall: agents and tooling on top of our tech stack that let a small senior team do the work of a much bigger one.

• Own our employer brand. Shape how the best people in the world first hear about Wispr, well before we ever reach out to them.

What you won't be doing

• Installing the playbook from your last company. We want first-principled thinkers who will think through the business problem first.

• Managing a vendor bench that's "fine."

• Playing telephone, where a hiring manager asks a recruiter who asks an agent and back again. People run their own pipelines here, and you're the one who makes that easy.

• Waiting on three layers of approval. We get to an answer in days, not weeks.

• Staying quiet when something's broken. You'll say so, and we'll fix it.

The bar

We hire people whose former employers are still trying to win back. That's the bar for everyone we bring in, including this role, and it's the bar you'll hold the whole company to once you're here.

Who you are

• You’ve built and scaled recruiting through hypergrowth, so you know firsthand where funnels break as a company grows from 100 to 1,000 people.

• You can tell an exceptional hire from a merely strong one, and you can do it inside a 45-minute conversation.

• Candidates you didn't close still send you referrals. You're good at reading what people actually want.

• You have real stories about improbable closes, the kind where you found a warm path in after the front door was locked.

• You sell by understanding people first. You can pitch a frontier-lab researcher and a first sales hire with equal credibility because you took the time to learn what each of them actually wants.

• Great recruiters want to work for you. Some would follow you here.

• You make founders better, and you tell them the truth. You cut processes that aren't earning their keep, and you're slow to add more.

• You'll be a real power user of Wispr Flow. A head of talent who doesn't love the product shows it to every candidate.

Why this role, why now

Most Head of Talent jobs hand you a system someone else built and ask you to keep it running. This one asks you to build it, at a company that will triple in size this year, when every early hire shapes everything that follows.

You'll work directly with Tanay Kothari and Sahaj Garg, and a team that's already excellent at what they do, with equity in a company that's growing fast. This is the most important hire we'll make this year. Get it right, and you'll have built the foundation everything else stands on.

Logistics

Location. About 60% of the team is in San Francisco and the rest are remote, mostly US-based.

• If you're in SF: you'll be in the office most days. We think the best work happens in person. Most of the team is here five days a week, and a few do three or four days depending on family or long commutes.

• If you're remote: we're open to remote for some roles. We fly remote teammates to SF for three to four days a month.

Visa sponsorship. We sponsor visas: H1B, O1, EB1, L1, STEM + OPT, and more. We can't successfully sponsor for every role and every candidate, but if we make you an offer we'll make every reasonable effort, and we retain an immigration law firm to help.

What we offer

We're a small, focused team that cares deeply about the quality of our work and the people we do it with. Here's what you can expect:

• Equity on employee-friendly terms, including extended exercise windows and a combination of ISOs and RSUs. Ask us for more details!

• Health, dental and vision. We cover 100% of the premium on the Anthem Blue Cross Gold PPO, and 75% of premiums for dependents. (US only)

• 401(k) with up to a 4% match. (US only)

• Flexible time off and company holidays.

• All meals in the office, plus commuter benefits and relocation reimbursement if you’re moving to San Francisco.

• A high-spec laptop, monitor, and a whisper-friendly microphone.

• Regular team events and off-sites.

• 16 weeks of paid parental leave (12 weeks for non-birthing parent). The early days with a new baby matter more than anything we're doing here, and we want you to be present for them.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We’re designing how humans interact with AI, which makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

We are committed to ensuring a fair and accessible interview process. If you need any accommodations or adjustments, please let us know.