Director : Talent and Culture

Director : Talent & Culture @ Sentient

As Director : Talent & Culture, you'll be the architect of how talent shows up at Sentient, designing and owning our hiring engine, culture-building practices, and performance infrastructure from the ground up. This is a hands-on, high-impact role ideal for a talent operator who can both recruit world-class technical talent and build the systems that help them thrive.

You'll work directly with the cofounders and early team to shape how Sentient grows, setting the bar for who we hire, how we collaborate, and what it means to build a generational company in a frontier space. You should be excited to move quickly, iterate often, and drive quality and cultural integrity at every touchpoint.

Your Responsibilities

• Own full-cycle recruiting across technical, research, and operational roles, from sourcing to closing.
• Design and implement scalable hiring processes, tools, and candidate experiences aligned with our mission and values.
• Partner with founders and team leads to define hiring plans, role design, and organizational structure.
• Build and embed foundational culture practices, including onboarding, rituals, internal comms, and team norms.
• Develop and maintain lightweight performance and feedback systems to support high trust and high autonomy.
• Track key hiring and people metrics to drive continuous improvement and hiring efficiency.
• Support leadership with org design, compensation planning, leveling frameworks, and succession planning.
• Champion diversity, transparency, and long-term thinking across all talent-related decisions.

What You'll Need

Preferred

Core Competencies for Director : Talent & Culture @ Sentient

These six competencies reflect what success looks like in the role and can be used for interviews, evaluations, and development planning.

Competency

Description

Ability to design and execute full-cycle recruiting for technical, research, and operational roles. Understands how to scale early-stage teams with speed, precision, and cultural alignment.

Skill in shaping team norms, onboarding, rituals, and cultural foundations that reflect Sentient's values. Acts as a steward of culture during scale.

Designs scalable systems for feedback, leveling, performance reviews, and development without bureaucracy. Balances trust with accountability.

Operates without clear roadmaps or established systems. Comfortable owning new functions and iterating rapidly. Thrives in zero-to-one environments.

Can communicate clearly and influence founders, engineers, and external partners. Collaborates effectively across functions to drive hiring and org decisions.

Deep resonance with Sentient's mission for open-source AGI. Applies ethical, long-term thinking in people's decisions. Leads with integrity and care.