Talent Acquisition Lead in London

Can you help us fix the world's most broken supply chain? The fashion industry produces over 100 billion garments a year. 60% end up in landfill, not because people don't want these clothes, but because the supply chain for getting secondhand fashion from donation to resale is completely offline, manual, and broken. Fleek is fixing this. Our mission is to make secondhand the first choice. We are building the infrastructure powering the global secondhand clothing trade, through a B2B marketplace and the AI systems digitising the supply chain behind it.

Through Fleek, vintage stores, online resellers, and retail buyers source graded secondhand inventory directly from wholesalers and rag houses across multiple countries. Our key enabler is FleekSort, an AI model fine-tuned on secondhand fashion, that can grade, price, and categorise items with just a photo, turning what has historically been an opaque and manual trade into a structured, searchable, and tradable global inventory layer. Since 2022, we have saved 9 million items from landfill and tripled in size year-on-year. We have raised ~$50M from a16z, Y Combinator, HV Capital, and others, and have recently closed our Series B. Our advisors and private investors include operators behind Depop, Shopify, and Postmates. Today, we serve thousands of resellers and retailers across the UK, Europe, and the US. With the secondhand fashion market projected to reach $350B by 2027, Fleek is building the AI-native operational and financial backbone for secondhand commerce globally.

We are looking for people who want to build something that matters, and move fast doing it. Sound good? Keep reading.

About the Role: We are looking for a Founding Talent Lead to own end-to-end hiring for our Engineering and Product teams in London and lead the buildout of Fleek's talent function. You will report directly to the CEO and be the primary driver of technical hiring at one of Europe's fastest-growing AI startups. You will be operating in a high-velocity, early-stage environment where the briefs are sometimes ambiguous, the brand is still being built, and the infrastructure you depend on is being designed in parallel with the work. You will help build both.

This is also more than a delivery role. You will also be a key contributor to the talent architecture we are building: role frameworks, interview structures, sourcing playbooks, AI-integrated hiring workflows. We build with AI here, not just use it. You will be expected to use tools like Claude Code to create real recruiting products and tooling, not just draft outreach messages. The systems you help build now will define how Fleek hires for the next phase of growth. This is a rare opportunity to shape a technical talent function from the ground up, at a company that is doubling annually and backed by a16z and Y Combinator. For someone ambitious who wants to step up and ultimately own this function, the scope here is significant.

What Makes You a Fleek Talent Lead?

• Sourcing Excellence: You know how to find people who do not know they are looking. You have built pipelines in markets without brand recognition, using creative outreach, community mapping, and relentless curiosity. A blank screen does not slow you down.
• Calibration Partner: You push back on hiring managers when the brief is vague, the bar is inconsistent, or the process is creating more noise than signal. You have sat in rooms where no one agreed on what good looked like and made progress anyway.
• Technically Literate: You do not need to write code, but you understand the difference between a backend and platform engineer, why a principal IC is different from an engineering manager, and what separates a genuinely strong technical candidate from a polished one. You speak the language credibly enough to earn trust on both sides.
• High-Velocity Operator: You are comfortable running 20+ interviews a week without letting quality slip. You process feedback quickly, keep pipelines moving, and do not lose candidates to slow decisions.
• Builder Mentality: You do not just use the system. You improve it. You think in frameworks, build repeatable processes, and leave hiring infrastructure better than you found it.
• AI Builder: You do not just use AI tools in your workflow. You build with them. Whether it is creating a sourcing automation, designing a screening tool, or prototyping a new process in Claude Code, you see AI as a way to create real leverage, not just save time on emails.

What You'll Do

• Own Technical Hiring End-to-End: Drive end-to-end recruitment for Engineering and Product roles in London, from role design through offer close. You will own the full pipeline with accountability for both quality and velocity.
• Source Where Others Can't: Build cold outreach strategies, community pipelines, and creative sourcing approaches to find exceptional technical talent in markets where Fleek does not yet have brand recognition.
• Calibrate Hiring Managers: Partner with Engineering and Product leaders to define what great looks like for each role, challenge vague or inconsistent briefs, and build structured scorecards that make hiring decisions faster and more defensible.
• Build the Talent Architecture: Help design and implement the hiring infrastructure at Fleek: role frameworks, interview structures, levelling guides, approval workflows, and process standards that scale as the team grows.
• Build Recruiting Products with AI: Use Claude Code and other AI tools to create real tools and systems for the talent function: sourcing automation, referral infrastructure, pipeline analytics, candidate evaluation tooling. This is building, not prompting.
• Support Strategic Talent Projects: Contribute to employer branding, hiring events, talent community building, and the development of Fleek's external presence in the London engineering market.
• Own Candidate Experience: Maintain a fast, respectful, and high-quality candidate experience at every touchpoint. In a market without a strong inbound brand, every candidate interaction is brand-building.

What You Bring

• 6+ years of in-house technical recruiting experience at a startup or scale-up where you were building process as well as delivering hires.
• A track record in an early-stage business where the brand was unknown and you were working at pace. This is a hard requirement, not a preference. If your entire career has been at established companies with strong inbound pipelines, this is not the right role.
• A proven track record of sourcing and closing technical talent in competitive markets without relying on employer brand recognition.
• Experience hiring for Engineering roles (backend, frontend, full-stack, infrastructure/platform). Other non-tech roles are a plus.
• Strong calibration instincts: you have partnered effectively with technical hiring managers and helped them define and standardise what good looks like.
• High comfort with ambiguity: you have operated in environments where roles shift, priorities change, and you still close.
• Demonstrable experience building with AI tools, not just using them. You have created workflows, tools, or systems using AI. Bonus if you have used Claude Code or similar AI coding tools.
• Experience working with a tier one ATS like Ashby, Greenhouse, or Pinpoint.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management: direct, organised, and easy to work with at pace.
• A genuine interest in building talent systems, not just filling seats.

Ready to build the engineering team behind one of the fastest-growing AI startups in Europe? If you want to own high-impact technical hiring, build real tools with AI, and shape how a post-Series B company scales its technical talent function, we would love to hear from you.

How We Hire For This Role

• Recruiter Screen (45 min video call with Matthew Parker, Talent Advisor).
• CTO Interview (45 min video call with Sanket, CTO).
• Case Study (take-home over a few days, then a 60 minute live presentation at our London office).
• Founder Final (30-45 min in-person with Abhi, CEO).

We aim to move fast. From application to offer, the process typically takes 2-3 weeks.

How We Work

Fleek is an in-office company. We believe the best work happens when people are together: the quick decisions, the cross-functional energy, the ability to solve problems in real time. Most of the team works from our London HQ 3-4 days a week. We are not prescriptive about it. Performance and trust matter more than attendance. We hire adults and treat them accordingly.

The Practicalities

• Location: London HQ, Commercial St, E1 (Liverpool St / Aldgate East)
• Work model: In-office, typically 3-4 days per week
• Level: Lead
• Stage: Post-Series B, hyper-growth
• Team: 100+ across London, India, and Pakistan (~20 in London office)
• Culture: High ownership, non-hierarchical, fast-moving. Founder-led with strong opinions loosely held.

Our Values

• Dream Big and Disrupt Yourself: Push the most ambitious version of what you are building. Step out of your comfort zone. Nothing is out of reach.
• Absolute Ownership: The buck stops with you. Drive initiatives to completion. Experiment, learn, persevere. The job is not done until the job is done.
• Curiosity Leads the Way: Do not accept anything at face value. Ask questions you do not know the answer to. That is how you innovate.
• Talk to the Customer: Deeply understand their challenges, motivations, and ambitions. Every decision starts with the customer at the centre.
• Embrace Diversity: A global team building for a global supply chain. Bring your authentic self and embrace the diversity of everyone you encounter.