Recruiting Lead

Harper•San Francisco, CA

21d•Onsite

About The Position

We're on the frontier of building an AI-native professional services company. We're building the best AI commercial insurance distribution engine for scale. The Problem 36 million businesses in America need insurance. It's not optional—regulations require it, contracts demand it, landlords won't lease without it. Yet the industry is broken. 77% of small businesses are underinsured. 40% have no coverage at all. Most don't even understand what their policies cover. They're running with risk because the distribution system failed them—too slow, too opaque, too confusing to navigate. Over 90% of commercial insurance distribution is still human-led. The same manual process as 30 years ago—just with email instead of fax. Brokers playing phone tag with underwriters. Customers chasing quotes for weeks. Everyone hoping someone gets it right. We're building the inverse: 90%+ AI-led, inching toward the higher 90s. To do that, we need to assemble one of the highest-caliber teams in the industry. That's where you come in. The Thesis Every industry with human-bounded distribution consolidates rapidly once someone makes it computational. Search had thousands of engines until Google made ranking computational. Ride-hailing was fragmented until Uber made dispatch computational. When distribution becomes computational, Jevons Paradox kicks in: increased efficiency leads to increased consumption. Better search didn't mean less searching—it meant vastly more. Cheaper rides didn't mean fewer trips—it meant transportation for use cases that never existed. Insurance will follow the same pattern. When getting the right coverage becomes fast and frictionless, the 77% of underinsured businesses will finally get properly protected. The market expands, not contracts. We're building the engine that makes that happen. You'll build the team that builds the engine. The Role You'll be Harper's first dedicated recruiting hire—building the talent function from the ground up while closing candidates yourself. This isn't a coordination role. You're sourcing, selling, and closing exceptional people across engineering, sales, and GTM. You've seen what good recruiting systems look like. You understand the infrastructure needed to scale from 30 to 100+ without creating chaos and debt that someone else has to clean up later. You'll build repeatable processes—sourcing playbooks, structured interviews, calibrated scorecards—while staying hands-on in the pipeline. Technical recruiting background preferred. You understand tech stacks, know which competitors to pull from, and have a developed mind map of the technical landscape. You can learn GTM recruiting; the reverse is harder. You'll work directly with the founders. There's no committee. No approval chain. You source it, you sell it, you close it, you own the outcome.

Requirements

4-8 years in recruiting, ideally 6-8 years
Technical recruiting background strongly preferred
Experience building recruiting processes and systems, not just filling roles
Ability to source, sell, and close candidates directly—not just coordinate
Deep understanding of technical roles, tech stacks, and the engineering talent landscape
Based in San Francisco or willing to relocate

Nice To Haves

Experience at high-growth startups (Series A/B stage)
Background recruiting for AI-native or technical sales organizations
Experience building employer brand and recruiting content
Some people management experience

Responsibilities

Close candidates yourself. This is the core. You're in the weeds every day—sourcing, screening, selling, and closing. Engineering roles, GTM roles, whatever the company needs. You know how to find candidates others can't reach and convince them to join before they hit the market.
Build the recruiting infrastructure. Create the systems that let Harper scale without breaking. Repeatable sourcing strategies, structured interview processes, calibrated scorecards, candidate experience that reflects who we are. No chaos, no debt—just a machine that works.
Own technical recruiting. You understand the tech stack and how everything is interconnected. You know which companies to pull from. You can evaluate whether an engineer is actually good, not just credentialed. This is your home base.
Expand into GTM and operations. Once technical recruiting is running, you'll build pipelines for sales, marketing, and ops roles. Your technical foundation makes learning these functions easier—you understand how the pieces fit together.
Partner with founders on hiring strategy. Translate org needs into hiring plans. Push back when job specs don't make sense. Help us figure out what we actually need, not just what we think we want.
Build toward scale. As Harper grows, so does the function. You'll eventually bring on specialized recruiters underneath you. But first, you prove you can do it yourself and build the systems they'll inherit.