Founding Recruiter

About Krea

At Krea, we are building next-generation AI creative tools. We’re dedicated to making AI intuitive and controllable for creatives - our mission is to build tools that empower human creativity, not replace it. We believe AI is a new medium that allows us to express ourselves through various formats - text, images, video, sound, and even 3D. We're building better, smarter, and more controllable tools to harness this medium.

We’ve raised over $83M and are backed by world-class Silicon Valley investors such as Andreesen Horowitz and Bain Capital. We work full-time and in-person at our waterfront office in San Francisco. We care about creativity: our team includes musicians, designers, visual artists, and engineers.

This job:

We've never had a dedicated talent person. You'd be the first.

We're growing fast and need to hire exceptional people across the full stack of the company - engineering, AI research, infrastructure, product, design, GTM, and ops. And we need someone to own the strategy, the process, the pipelines, the candidate experience, and the employer brand to make it happen.

You'll sit at the center of how Krea grow. Done right, this becomes the talent function that lets us stay small and elite while shipping at the level of a much larger team.

What you’ll do:

Build the function

• Design and own Krea's approach to talent — philosophy, process, tooling, and the lightweight systems that make it scale without adding bureaucracy.

• Build pipelines across every function (engineers, researchers, product, design, GTM, ops, creatives). Each discipline has different talent pols and different ways to find the best people.

• Create a candidate experience that reflects who we are: fast and thoughtful.

Find the right people

• Source across the obvious and non-obvious: industry networks, academia, open source, communities, personal projects, referrals, events.

• Go deep on candidates. Read the repos. Read the papers. Watch the demos. Understand what someone has actually built before you decide if they're worth pursuing.

• Build and maintain a strong network in AI/ML and engineering — or know how to build one quickly if you're newer to the space.

Own the process end to end

• Run full-cycle recruiting across all functions: sourcing, screening, scheduling, closing. Move fast and follow through.

• Stay informed on how the market is moving — where strong people are coming from, what candidates care about, how the competitive landscape is shifting.

People ops and the full employee experience

• Own onboarding: make sure every new hire's first weeks are well-structured, welcoming, and set them up for success quickly.

• Handle the operational side of the employee lifecycle - offer letters, employment agreements, and the day-to-day HR processes that a growing team needs.

• Be a trusted resource for the team on anything people-related: compensation questions, role clarity, team dynamics, career development.

• Work with leadership on culture as the team scales — what we want to preserve and what needs to evolve.

Immigration and visas

• Own immigration end to end. A meaningful portion of our team is international and this isn't a peripheral task — it's core to how we hire.

• Manage active visa cases (H-1B, O-1, E-3, TN, STEM OPT extensions) in partnership with outside counsel: timelines, filings, status tracking, employee communication.

Represent Krea externally

• Shape how the outside world understands who we are through job descriptions, events, and the overall candidate experience.

• Contribute to employer brand as we grow — what Krea stands for as a place to work and why exceptional people should want to be here.

What we're looking for

There's no single path to this role. What matters is that you can do the job.

• Builder mentality. You're comfortable starting from zero. You don't need a playbook handed to you. You'd rather design the right process than inherit someone else's.

• Breadth. You're not a specialist. You can hire across product, infra, AI research, GTM, ops, and creative roles — and support the people in those roles once they're here. Each requires a different approach and you're curious enough to figure out what you don't already know.

• Technical depth. Our team is deeply engineering-focused. You need to be able to evaluate technical work directly at the top of the funnel. An engineering background is the most natural path, but what we really care about is whether you can tell a strong engineer from a mediocre one without leaning on someone else.

• A track record of closing strong people. Whether you came to this as a recruiter, an engineer, a founder, or someone who built teams another way — you've done it before and you can do it again.

• Good judgment about people. Technical screens are part of it, but you also have strong instincts about motivation, culture, and fit.

What we offer:

• Visa support (STEM OPT, OPT, H-1B, O-1, E-3).

• A chance to work closely with a world-class engineering and research team.

• Real ownership over how we hire and how we grow.

• Competitive compensation (75th percentile of market) with meaningful equity.