Founding People Lead (m/f/d) in Hamburg

You are the first dedicated People & Talent hire at Patterno. You own how we find, hire, onboard, and keep the people who build this company.

We are just past 20 people.

The plan is to multiply that in the next months and years, and every single seat matters.

You own that build-out end to end, from the first Linked In message to the signed contract to the first 90 days on the job.

This is not a coordinator role.

There is no team to delegate to.

You are hands-on in the sourcing, the conversations, the interview loops, the offer negotiations, the onboarding, and the employer brand.

You build the playbook, run the funnel, and own the hires.

• What success looks like in your first 90 days
• Five hires closed across GTM, with time-to-hire measured, tracked, and trending down.
• A standardized interview loop live for every priority role, with clear scorecards and calibrated interviewers.
• Employer brand on Linked In live and consistent, with a steady drumbeat of content the team is proud of.
• Onboarding standardized end to end, so every new hire lands, ramps, and knows what good looks like in week one.
• A live picture of the hiring funnel: sourced, in process, offers out, offers signed, drop-off reasons per stage.

What you will do

• Own full-cycle recruiting across all departments. Sourcing, first calls, interview loops, offers, closing.
• Live in Linked In Recruiter. Build outbound sourcing lists that actually convert, not vanity funnels.
• Improve our employer brand. Linked In presence, careers page, team storytelling, event visibility.
• Design and calibrate interview loops per role. Scorecards, structured questions, decision meetings.
• Own onboarding end to end. First-week plan, 30-60-90 milestones, and the feedback loop that keeps improving both.
• Own comp bands and offer strategy. Benchmark, negotiate, close. Keep pay competitive and fair as we scale.
• Own the People stack.

Contracts, offsites, culture rituals, performance reviews, and the internal processes that let a team of 20 turn into a team of 100 without losing what makes us us.

• Feed every signal back to the founders: which channels ship talent, where we lose candidates, and where the next hire has to land.

What you bring

• Must-haves
• 1+ year of hands-on recruiting, talent, or People experience, ideally in-house at a high-growth startup or scale-up.
• Fluent in Linked In Recruiter and modern sourcing tools. You can build a targeted list, open a cold candidate, and run a real conversation.
• You have closed candidates. You know how to sell a company, handle a counter-offer, and get to signature.
• You care about the craft of hiring, not just filling seats.
• Nice-to-haves
• Strong personal network into top Sales teams in Germany.
• Early track record of hiring GTM talent.
• Employer branding and Linked In content experience.
• Comfortable building AI-native workflows with tools like Claude Code, n8n, Clay, or comparable, to make sourcing and screening compound.
• People Ops experience: onboarding programs, comp benchmarking, performance cycles.
• Background in fast-scaling B2B Saa S.
• You might be a fit if you
• Get a kick out of closing a candidate who was already off the market.
• Are comfortable saying no to a candidate before the founders have to.
• Move at builder speed, not corporate HR speed.
• Are hungry for ownership and not interested in waiting for permission.
• Have something outside of work that shows you don't do things halfway, whether that's competitive sports, a side project, or something completely different.
• See this as the path to becoming Head of People in a company that plans to scale fast.

What we offer

• The first dedicated People & Talent seat at Patterno, shaping the team that defines our growth.
• Direct proximity to the founders on every strategic hire and every people decision.
• A serious recruiting budget with real autonomy over how you deploy it.
• Linked In Recruiter and a best-in-class sourcing stack from day one.
• An AI-native People stack. If a tool makes hiring faster, sharper, or more human, we will get it.
• Mac Book, sport membership, and everything you need to work at builder speed.
• A clear path to Head of People as the team scales.
• A young, hungry, on-site team in Hamburg where people care deeply about their craft.
• Why now

Patterno is past the demo stage.

We are live with large customers in one of Europe's most critical and least digitized markets.

The sales motion is working, pipeline is growing, and the team is about to compound.

The next 24 months decide who this company becomes.

Every hire from here shapes the culture, the pace, and the standard.

You own that.

You will hire the Sales team, the Customer Success team, the Marketing team, and the enablers around them, and you will build the People engine that keeps all of it moving forward without losing the edge.

We are building the company that makes sure every relevant tender reaches the right company at the right time.

Procurement intelligence should not be locked behind manual research, outdated portals, and broken data.

Great people build great software, and you are the one who finds them.

Building from Europe

What drives us is the belief that Europe's long-term prosperity depends on a strong, sovereign technology ecosystem.

We need more AI-first European companies competing on the global stage.

Our mission is to build a category-defining company from Europe. Our HQ is here, but we benchmark ourselves globally and plan to sell internationally from the beginning.

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