Senior Recruiter (EMEA) - Series B, Sequoia-backed Scale-up

Senior Recruiter (EMEA)

Salary: Up to £140,000 + equity

Location : London, onsite (5 days per week)

The Opportunity:

Hawkwood is partnering with a fast-growing, Sequoia-backed enterprise AI company to make its first hire in EMEA.

Having established strong traction in the US, the company is now at the beginning of its European expansion. It has already won customers across the region and sees a significant opportunity to establish an early presence and build from that momentum.

This hire will play a central role in making that happen.

Joining as the first recruiter on the ground in London, you’ll partner closely with the US Talent team and senior business leaders to build the foundations for hiring across EMEA. The initial focus will be on GTM and revenue hiring, alongside technically oriented customer-facing roles, with the breadth to support other critical hires as the organisation grows.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role with genuine strategic influence. You’ll work closely with senior leaders to shape hiring plans, bring insight from the local talent market and help determine where the business invests its headcount.

The company operates with a flat, high-ownership culture, so this is an opportunity for someone who wants to build, recruit and solve problems rather than simply inherit an established playbook.

What you'll do:

• Own full-cycle recruiting across EMEA, with an initial emphasis on sales, revenue and other GTM hiring alongside technically oriented customer-facing roles.
• Act as the first Talent partner on the ground in London, helping establish the local recruiting infrastructure, processes and ways of working needed to support European growth.
• Partner closely with senior leaders to define roles, calibrate profiles and establish what exceptional talent looks like in a new market.
• Build high-quality candidate pipelines through proactive sourcing, networking and creative approaches to engaging talent.
• Bring market intelligence into the business, advising leaders on talent availability, compensation, location and the realities of hiring in London and across EMEA.
• Operate comfortably across both strategy and execution, from challenging a hiring brief to personally sourcing and closing candidates.
• Help translate an established US Talent model into an effective EMEA approach, identifying where local market nuances require different systems or processes.
• Use the company’s own AI product to automate recruiting workflows, interrogate hiring data and create greater leverage across the Talent function.
• Use data and candidate feedback to continuously refine hiring strategies and provide clear insight into how the market is responding.

You will bring:

• 5+ years of full-cycle recruiting experience, ideally gained within high-growth B2B SaaS, AI or technology businesses.
• Strong GTM and revenue recruiting expertise, with the ability to understand and hire for technically complex or product-oriented roles where required.
• Experience operating in an early-stage or high-growth environment where you have needed to build, adapt and solve problems without extensive infrastructure around you.
• Ideally, exposure to both earlier-stage businesses and larger technology organisations, giving you an understanding of what strong recruiting looks like at different points of scale.
• Deep knowledge of the London technology talent market and the credibility to advise US-based stakeholders on local hiring dynamics.
• The confidence to operate independently as the first recruiter in a new region while remaining highly connected to a global Talent team.
• Excellent sourcing capability and a strong instinct for identifying exceptional talent beyond obvious profiles or company logos.
• Commercial judgement and the confidence to challenge hiring managers constructively rather than simply execute against a brief.
• High agency, adaptability and genuine comfort with ambiguity.
• A thoughtful interest in AI and how it can fundamentally change recruiting workflows, rather than simply augment existing processes.

We recognise how challenging this current job market is for candidates, and Hawkwood are therefore striving to provide the best candidate experience we can. If you are interested in this opportunity, we kindly request that you apply via this LinkedIn advert, as opposed to sending us an email or LinkedIn direct message. We are eager to ensure that each candidate application is considered fairly, and receives a consistent experience. Unfortunately, we cannot ensure this standard if you inquire about a role via email or LinkedIn message, as it falls outside of our established process.