The mandate: Build the internal AI systems that let 50 people run an $80M company — production agents, workflows, and automations across recruiting, security and compliance, finance operations, customer onboarding, and GTM — working directly with the founders on whatever is highest-priority. What the title is actually saying: Retell wants someone who has run their own company. Not as a nice-to-have. The responsibility list is the exact set of problems a technical founder solves personally in year two — hiring pipeline, security questionnaires from the first enterprise customer, chasing invoices, onboarding accounts, building the outbound machine — except here you build systems instead of doing it by hand, with $80M of revenue behind you and no fundraising. "This is not a narrowly scoped role, it is a high-ownership builder position." What You'll Own HR and recruiting AI
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Structured signal extraction from résumés — skills, experience, founder traits, domain expertise
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Lead scoring models predicting interview success and role fit
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AI recruiter workflows for screening and qualification
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Personalized outbound and candidate engagement automation Security and compliance
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Automation for BAAs, DPAs, DocuSign, and contract review flows
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Security questionnaire and compliance response generation
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Internal tooling for enterprise readiness and audit Operational infrastructure
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Accounts receivable automation and finance email workflows
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Automated enterprise onboarding and account setup
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Systems that cut manual overhead across teams Integrations and platform
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Salesforce, HubSpot, GoHighLevel
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Zapier, n8n, Make
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LLM systems on OpenAI, Gemini, Claude, and others
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API integrations connecting internal systems GTM engineering
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HubSpot and Lark automations for sales and marketing efficiency
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Lifecycle automation for engagement and retention
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Website personalization and ad content generation
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Email personalization and outbound pipelines at scale Requirements Hard gates:
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Founded a company, and was technical in it. The title says so. Ask what they built with their own hands.
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Bachelor's in CS, CE, or a closely related technical field. Only Retell req with no "or equivalent" escape — and an odd fit against an ex-founder pool that includes dropouts. Push on whether it's firm.
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2+ years professional software engineering. Time as a founder counts if they were writing the code.
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1+ year startup experience. Automatic for this pool.
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Hands-on production LLM or AI agent work. Systems that ran and that people depended on.
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Redwood City (confirm on-site status) Profile:
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3–8 years total. Enough runway that the startup is behind them, not so much that they've forgotten the pace.
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Comfortable across product, engineering, GTM, and operations — which a solo or two-person founder is by definition
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Prefers building systems to executing defined tasks
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Cares about real-world impact over technical elegance Strong bonuses:
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YC, Techstars, or a named accelerator — shared vocabulary with a YC W24 founding team, and Michael Seibel and Tyler Bosmeny are on the cap table
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Company reached real revenue or real users before ending. Different signal from an idea that never shipped.
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Shipped an agent system that touched money or hiring decisions — the reliability and trust problems are the hard part
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GTM or RevOps engineering with real code behind it — Clay, HubSpot, Salesforce, outbound at scale
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Sold or wound down cleanly — process discipline, not just building
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Automation platform depth: Zapier, n8n, Make, Retool, Temporal, Airflow
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Contract, compliance, or document-workflow automation
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Evaluation and reliability work on LLM systems Location and visa:
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Redwood City
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Sponsorship: Yes — H-1B, TN, L-1, E-3, F-1 (OPT/CPT), and O-1 Anti-patterns
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Founders still founding. The single biggest risk on this req. Someone raising a seed, or six months from raising again, will take this as a bridge and leave. Screen for a genuine decision to stop.
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Business-side founders. Technical is in the title.
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Founders whose company never shipped anything real
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Anyone who needs to be a founder to be motivated — this is an IC seat inside someone else's company
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No-code operators without engineering fundamentals — the loop has a 90-minute coding round
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Deep specialists who want one problem for two years
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People who'd read "recruiting automation" as beneath them
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Remote requirements without confirmation Who Will Thrive Here
Someone who ran a company for two to four years, wrote most of the code, did the hiring and the contracts and the invoicing themselves, and has decided they'd rather do that at a company that's already working. They want the same breadth without the fundraising, the payroll anxiety, or the existential question of whether the thing works. Retell's answer to that last one is $80M ARR. The scope is founder-shaped; the risk isn't.