Talent Lead

I quit medicine because I kept watching patients die needlessly, for avoidable reasons. In almost every case, the science and the clinicians were fine. It was the system around them that failed: the way information moved, the way decisions got routed, and the way fragmented teams and fragmented data turned solvable problems into tragedy. Our mission is human wellbeing, and we're focusing on the breakthrough technology of personalised medicine. Since the beginning, our proprietary insight has always been that the company to create a true active learning data engine with a loss function against human wellbeing would be the one to crack it, becoming one of the most impactful companies in the world as a result. We're now in 1,100+ clinics, across 4 product lines, serve >20% of the UK population, and have solved >5.7 million patient cases in the past 12 months alone, saving an estimated 8,600 lives. We are cash flow positive, growing fast, and have a tight crew of ~35 people. Multiple trillion‑dollar companies will be built in healthcare over the next two decades, and we intend to be one of them.

We have a knights of the round table culture with a flat hierarchy, where we empower builders to have outsized impact on millions of lives, and where we collaboratively converge on the optimal action without dogma or ego. We're all here to serve a greater mission than ourselves. The closest analogy for our culture is probably Firefly (the TV series): a small crew on a ship at the frontier, each person exceptional in a specific way, deeply loyal to each other and the mission, resourceful under constraints, and having a genuinely good time doing something that matters. We're carefully curated, lean, and wholeheartedly in. If you want your skills to be at the highest possible stakes, you belong at Anima. Your work here will save lives.

Our trajectory towards delivering personalized medicine has been unwavering since our application to YC in 2021. Long before the current "vertical AI" craze, we were obsessed with active reinforcement learning—a niche field in 2021 that the world, pre‑ChatGPT, largely ignored. In 2021, we codified this in a patent that anticipated the active learning loops now fundamental to modern LLMs and agentic systems. Talent density is the singular driver of achieving this mission. The relationship is a power law: the difference between a team of exceptional people and a team of good people compounds over time in ways that are difficult to overstate. This is why we're so selective, why 35 people serve 20% of a country's population, and why we'll stay selective even under pressure to scale headcount.

As our Talent Lead, you will own this. You will build our talent function into a compounding machine that consistently brings the very best people to Anima. It is no exaggeration to say that every new hire saves lives. The Talent Lead will own the strategy and execution of hiring for every role in the business. You will work closely with hiring managers to define job requirements, creatively source candidates across every possible channel, and define slick operations that ensure our hiring managers own their processes with a 100% F1 score (no false negatives, no false positives). We stop at nothing to recruit the very best people to Anima, and you’ll be the vector by which we achieve that.

The ideal profile is anything from a seasoned talent professional to a wickedly smart, hungry generalist who is willing to just get things done. We want a “benevolent pirate” – someone whose slightly rebellious streak makes them willing to do anything to get the right people into the Anima crew. If this sounds like you, we cannot wait to hear from you.

Who you are

The only thing that matters in this role is the outcome. No matter your background – from wickedly smart generalist to seasoned hiring professional – we’re interested in speaking to anyone who has reason to believe they can do the job. However, we think you’re most likely to be successful in this role if:

• You have sourced and hired technical roles into a company with a high technical bar.
• You have excellent written communication, and can write cold outbound that senior technical candidates actually reply to.
• You have stood up and run a hiring function as a system, and know how to configure an ATS (for us, Ashby) with consistent stages, scorecards and interview plans.
• You have experience closing senior candidates against competing offers.
• You have selected and managed third‑party search partners.
• You are comfortable with numbers and can create dashboards and reporting that will build the compounding hiring engine.

What a great first 12 months looks like

• Every open role has a live pipeline, with no roles starved of top‑of‑funnel (ToFu).
• You’ll own every job’s pipeline, ensuring that each has ≥5 qualified candidates with scheduled intro conversations with the hiring manager at any time; ≥2 in technical / non‑technical interview stages at all times, and zero open roles with zero active candidates for more than 7 days.
• The best candidates reach our pipeline through every channel available to us.
• Direct outbound. You consistently get the attention of the greatest candidates on the market and bring them into a live job process.
• Referrals & external advocates. You’ve set up a successful first‑ and second‑order referral programme, with every employee's professional network mapped and tapped at least once.
• 3rd‑party talent partners. You have identified and established strong partnerships with the very best search partners and recruiters in every one of our target hiring geographies for our most important roles, and have a network of high‑performing recruiters for other roles.
• Events. You’ll have hosted Anima‑ or co‑branded events, such as hackathons, conferences, dinners or meetups, and have made impactful appearances at career fairs at major universities in the UK and US.
• Community. You have a consistent presence in the communities where the best people live, like research Slacks, niche Discords, X, or GitHub.
• Inbound. Every open role appears in all the right job boards, and our externally‑facing employer brand attracts the best candidates to apply for Anima.

Our pipeline runs as a well‑oiled machine.

• System built. You have tuned our ATS (Ashby) with consistent stages, interview plans, stages, scorecards, and reporting.
• Triage. Direct applications triaged fast: the top 10% identified and moved to first conversation within 48 hours.
• Hiring managers own their pipelines. Each hiring manager is trained on – and reliably runs – a written playbook designed to maximise F1 score without compromising candidate experience. They own their candidates’ progression through the hiring pipeline.
• Active. You keep hiring managers accountable, and ensure that no role sits in a single funnel stage for ≥48 hours without a known direct next step or follow‑up.

Closing is consistently high.

• Offer acceptance ≥95%. Every final‑stage candidate has a written sell plan before the offer is made, and executed on reliably, such that almost every offer gets to yes. You are relentless and creative about how we achieve this.
• Time‑to‑fill fast enough to win against other offers. Median time‑to‑fill is ≤55 days (engineering), ≤45 days (business). Median time‑in‑stage ≤7 days. ≥90% of candidates get a decision within 2 business days of their last interview.
• You have built a compounding hiring engine that gets better with every hire or rejection. Anima has mastered the discovery of power laws that result in exponentially improving functions.
• Analytics. Alongside our Growth team, you will have set up live hiring dashboards and analytics which bring performance‑marketing practices to hiring pipelines, so that we learn from every yes and every no.
• Learning loop is alive. You run 90‑day reviews on every hire, and regret‑hire rate.