Recruitment Lead

London | Full-time | Hybrid | Shoreditch/Liverpool Street

We’re Making Travel Effortless. Join Us.

Travel is essential, whether it’s visiting family, starting a new adventure, or taking a career defining trip. Yet today, over 4 billion airline passengers rely on tech that hasn't changed in decades.

At Duffel, we’re rebuilding the infrastructure underpinning the global travel industry. Backed by top-tier investors (Benchmark, Blossom, Index Ventures, and Kima Ventures) and born out of Y Combinator (S18), we’re simplifying complex systems to build the future of travel.

Recruitment at Duffel

We are looking for a Recruitment Lead to both manage our in-house recruiting team and be an on the ground recruiter, partnering with leaders on recruitment strategy and ensuring we maintain a consistently high hiring bar as we scale.

About the role:

What you’ll be doing:

• Manage a team of recruiters setting workload priorities, running 1:1s, keeping a pulse on pipelines, and supporting their development

• Partner closely with leaders on recruitment strategy and delivery across all functions, with a particular focus on scaling technical hiring

• Maintain and improve a structured interview infrastructure so the whole team runs a consistent, high-signal process

• Use data and insight to ensure a strong recruitment infrastructure, tracking and reporting on hiring KPIs through, quality-control on pipelines, and leaning on Ashby workflows

• Be the escalation point for hiring managers when a process isn't working

• Own end to end hiring, personally running search and building pipelines on technical, senior or niche roles alongside the team

What we're looking for:

• Extensive recruiting experience at a tech first company, including owning hiring metrics and reporting to senior leaders, not just running requisitions.

• Meaningful experience hiring mid to senior software engineers across the stack, with a clear view of where engineering hiring breaks down: assessment design, competing offers, counter-offers and sourcing by specialism.

• Experience leading, coaching and developing experienced recruiters, including planning team capacity against a hiring plan and rebalancing workload, rather than managing day to day.

• Strong data literacy in Ashby: you can read a hiring funnel and pinpoint where it's breaking using Time to Hire, Time to Fill, stage conversion, offer acceptance and source-of-hire data.

• Confident in forecasting capacity and demand: you can turn a hiring plan into recruiter headcount, lead times and the date each opening needs to go live, and flag early when a plan can't be delivered.

• A strategic, commercially minded approach: you can turn data into a prioritised plan with clear baselines, targets and expected ROI (e.g. agency spend versus in-house capacity).

• A quality-over-quantity mindset, with experience defining and tracking Quality of Hire and using it to steer where you source candidates and how the team hires.

• Adept at building and improving recruitment processes and infrastructure, with a strong grasp of structured interviewing, scorecards and assessment design, and a focus on great candidate and interviewer experiences.

• A champion of clean data and documentation: from interview guides to Ashby set-up (Jobs and Openings, sources, archive reasons). You keep Ashby accurate enough that leaders trust the numbers.

• Excellent stakeholder management: comfortable pushing back on hiring managers and execs with evidence when the plan or process needs it, in a fast-moving, collaborative environment.

Why You’ll Love Working at Duffel

We believe in true ownership. That’s why every permanent employee gets equity in the business.

✈️ Travel Allowance: We literally pay you to get out of town and explore the world.

🏝️ Work From Anywhere: Flexibility is built in. Work remotely, or take advantage of our Sabbatical Policy.

⚡ Electric Car Scheme: Roll up in a brand-new EV with eco-friendly tax savings.

⚖️ Work-Life Harmony: Flexible bank holidays, generous family leave, and a dedicated volunteering day.

📚 Growth Tools: Paid study days to level up your skills, plus a solid pension and cycle-to-work scheme.

🏥 Health & Wellbeing: Private healthcare, eye test cover, and season ticket loans.

🏡 Family Leave (maternity, paternity and adoption)

The Details

📍 Location: Shoreditch, London (Hybrid: In-office Tuesdays & Thursdays).

🧠 Interview Process:

1. Recruiter Screen

2. Hiring Manager Chat

3. Technical Case Study

4. Final Stage Interview

We are an equal opportunities employer. We believe that the key to our success is employing a diverse team, that's why recruitment decisions are only based on your experience and skills. We value your ability to problem solve and build amazing things so we welcome applications for everyone - regardless of age, sex, disability, sexual orientation, race, religion or belief.

Note to recruitment agencies Duffel does not accept speculative CV's from external parties. Any unsolicited CV's sent to us will be treated as property of Duffel, and any attached terms and conditions associated with these CV's will be null and void.