Head of Talent

Head Of Talent

Lumbra builds the vendor-neutral operating system for agentic AI in high-consequence environments. In our first ten months we won four fully competed prime contracts across the U.S. Government, every one of them deploying into classified spaces. We are live on JWICS. We were selected from a field of 200+ companies for a defense innovation challenge and won it. We beat two established defense primes on the same program and earned the follow-on, now in execution. Our team comes from the CIA unit that planned the bin Laden mission, MIT, frontier AI labs, and Special Operations.

Lumbra is post-Series A and scaling fast across engineering, GTM, product, design, operations, and security — entry-level through C-suite. We need a Head of Talent to own the recruiting function end-to-end and run it through the next stage of growth: someone who has scaled hiring across functions before, who can recruit engineers because they can actually talk to engineers, and who treats the recruiting org as a product they're building.

You hire the people who beat the primes.

What You'll Own

• Own the full recruiting function: sourcing through close, across every function and level, including the strategy, the processes, and the team that executes them.
• Run executive search for senior and C-suite hires in partnership with the CEO — the relationship work, the closing, and the discretion these searches demand.
• Recruit across engineering, GTM, product, design, operations, and security, scaling the function so no single vertical becomes a bottleneck as headcount grows.
• Build the cleared recruiting pipeline for TS/SCI engineers, FSO, FDE, and TPM roles — sourcing strategies for a candidate pool that doesn't behave like commercial tech.
• Design the hiring process itself: interview loops, scorecards, calibration, leveling, offer construction, and the feedback loops that hold quality steady under volume.
• Grow the recruiting team: sourcers, recruiters, coordinators, plus the operational rigor (ATS hygiene, reporting, candidate experience) that holds it all together.
• Own employer brand and the candidate-facing presence that makes Lumbra a place top operators want to come, in partnership with marketing and the founding team.

You'll Work Alongside

CIA officers, MIT engineers, Special Operations combat vets, and applied AI engineers from frontier labs like Anthropic and Google. You'll make decisions that immediately affect national security. You'll own part of a company early and when it matters.

This Role Is Not For

Someone who needs a defined playbook, prefers process to outcome, or is uncomfortable closing senior candidates personally.

Preferred Qualifications

• Cleared recruiting experience (TS/SCI, FSP, IC/DoD talent pipelines)
• Background recruiting at defense tech, national security, or government-adjacent companies
• Experience scaling from founding recruiter to leader of a multi-person team
• Familiarity with Ashby or comparable modern ATS tooling
• DC-market fluency for cleared and commercial talent

Must-haves

• 7+ years recruiting experience, including team leadership of a recruiting org through a period of rapid scaling
• Track record at commercial or national-security tech companies through Series A/B/C growth stages
• Demonstrated success recruiting across functions, not just one vertical
• Strong technical recruiting depth and comfort engaging substantively with engineers
• Experience owning executive search through to close
• U.S. citizenship
• Based in the National Capital Region