First Ops Hire

About Candix

Candix is where companies like Mistral find senior engineers that recruiters can't reach.

The market has shifted: companies have stopped training juniors, obsessing over seniors instead. But senior engineers are a nightmare to reach. Even when they're open to opportunities, they don't apply and ignore recruiter spam. Companies are left with referrals and founder outreach, which don't scale.

We're the only platform where senior engineers explore opportunities confidentially: no public profiles, just direct introductions to engineering managers, never recruiters.

Traction:

• 3,000+ engineers have joined (+20% MoM)
• 100+ VC-backed startups
• 40+ placements completed
• $0 to $350,000 run rate in under 9 months
• $2M raised from Seedcamp and Indeed's co-founder

The role

You own whether companies succeed on Candix.

Companies sign up, set up searches, and get daily matched candidates. The core product is strong: the best companies see 95%+ acceptance rates on hundreds of matches. But not everyone gets there, and the difference is whether they know how to use Candix well.

Right now this gets figured out manually with every company. What's blocking them, where they're confused, what they actually need versus what they think they need. Then it gets fixed: sometimes by talking to them, sometimes by changing how the product works, sometimes by building process.

You'll do this for every new company. Own their success, figure out where they get stuck, remove the obstacles. Then you'll start seeing patterns: the same questions, the same mistakes, the same friction points. That's when you build whatever eliminates the problem at scale, whether it's guiding product features or building better process.

What you'll actually do

The day-to-day:

• Talking to companies when they sign up
• Helping them set up searches that actually work
• Making sure match quality is there
• Following up, iterating, figuring out what's broken

The goal:

• Identifying what's repetitive and shouldn't be
• Building systems/tools/automation to remove friction
• Deciding what becomes product vs what stays process
• Scaling yourself from 50 companies to 500+ companies

First hire on this side of the business. You build it, you own it.

What we're looking for

Must-haves:

• Has built something 0→1 and scaled it past the scrappy phase
• Comfortable doing manual work to understand the problem deeply
• Sees patterns and builds systems, doesn't just execute
• Very good spoken English, ideally native or near-native (US companies)
• Comfortable working with some US timezone overlap (Pacific hours)

Nice-to-haves:

• Worked at a startup (<500 people)
• Has done recruiting (e.g. as a founder, recruiter, hiring manager)
• Has recruited senior engineers specifically
• Technical background (engineer, technical sourcer) or ops background

Why join

• Own outcomes with real companies - top AI labs, leading startups, the next wave of great companies
• Build the operating model from scratch - you build it, you own it. No playbook, you figure out what should exist
• Leverage - you're not sourcing or doing busywork. You're solving the high-level problem of how companies hire successfully on Candix