I help startups hire the humans who make the product work. 15+ years across full-cycle recruiting, recruiting operations, and People, at AI-native, developer-tooling, and infrastructure companies from Series A through D. Built the talent function from zero twice, scaled a third from 50 to 220+, and ran every one of them lean.
I also build the tooling. Working AI agents and automations, shipped and public, not slideware.
Translating subtle human signals into talent outcomes. Through years of recruiting and deep human observation, I've learned that a candidate's slope, curiosity, and genuine intent are just as measurable as their hard skills. This helps teams see the whole candidate, not just what's on paper. These unseen variables make the difference between a good hire and a transformative one.
Advising founders and execs, even when it's bad news. From good news to hard truths, just straight talk. I deliver the information with data behind it and an understanding touch, so we can take action. At times it's helping leaders see when we're asking too much, or not enough. Sometimes it's saying a candidate's yes is not coming before we spend weeks finding out. Other times it's knowing to give grace to a candidate whose hesitation is conscientiousness, not disinterest.
Designing the systems that make hiring repeatable. Interview methodology, structured scorecards, calibration cadence, leveling rubrics, job families, comp bands, capacity models. I built an escalating AI-fluency bar across an entire interview funnel at Replicated, from scratch, and it changed who got hired.
A design leader said everything we wanted to hear: compelling opportunity, interesting problems, a team to build. The founder was ready to move. But the urgency was off, the pacing was off, and they had just come out of a startup.
I said the yes was not coming, and that we were being used to close out a process somewhere larger. They took the other role.
We stopped spending weeks and executive capital on a search that was never going to land.
A senior engineering candidate took a long time to decide. The founder read it as disinterest and wanted to pull the offer.
I read it differently. This was someone who took commitment seriously enough not to perform certainty they hadn't earned yet. The hesitation was conscientiousness. Startups are hard, and people who join without being sure tend not to stay.
They accepted. Once they committed, they gave it everything. They just needed the time to be sure.
A company that still runs like a startup, whatever its headcount. A technical product I believe in. Hard problems that don't have answers yet. Smart, dedicated colleagues pulling toward the same goals. An influential and collaborative seat on how we hire, regardless of what the title says.
Humans are the first line of whether a company succeeds. I want to be the person making sure the right ones get in.