Lead Recruiter - Managed Recruiting

Avante is on a mission to transform how self-funded employers manage their benefits and HR operations. Our AI-powered SaaS platform helps employers shift from reactive firefighting to strategic planning, while providing employees with the guidance they need to truly understand and maximize their benefits.
Avante unifies fragmented benefits data and provides AI-driven insights that help employers control costs while delivering an exceptional employee experience.
We are based in Seattle with an in-office culture (4 days a week) to drive community, collaboration, and ideation.
We are hiring our first in-house recruiter at the inflection point where hiring stops being something that the founding team can absorb part-time. The next twelve months are the most active hiring stretch in Avante's history, and the person in this seat will set the bar for every hire that follows.
In any given month you will be running a variety of key searches across engineering, GTM, operations and customer-facing roles. The expectation is that you can run all of them at once, either directly or via oversight of external recruiting partners.
This role owns the entire recruiting machine end-to-end. You will sit in the room when we decide what bar we're hiring against, push back on hiring managers when their calibration drifts, and own the offer conversation when it's hard. Recruiting at Avante is a senior operator job, and we're going to treat it like one.
You will also be the first recruiter in the building who has to figure out what hiring looks like when the company is itself an AI agent platform. Own the full recruiting funnel from intake through offer accept across every function. Build the pipeline, run the process, debrief the panels, close the candidates.
Run, not just attend, the hiring process. Drive the program-management muscle that contract recruiters typically don't: weekly hiring manager reviews, scorecard discipline, calibration sessions, offer logistics, and clean handoffs to onboarding.
This is the core value-add over outsourced sourcing and is non-negotiable.
Manage external partners. Coordinate with fractional recruiting partners and agencies on overflow and specialized searches; decide where to spend, where to pull back, and when to bring work in-house.
Be the data layer for hiring. Maintain accurate pipeline metrics (time-to-fill, pass-through rates, source mix, offer accept rate) and report them weekly to leadership.
Every candidate, hired or not, leaves with a high opinion of Avante.
Build the recruiting playbook. Codify interview guides, scorecards, and intake templates so future hires can plug in.
5+ years of in-house recruiting experience at a high-growth startup or adjacent recruiting agency, ideally one that scaled from under 50 to several hundred people. Bonus point if in enterprise Saas or AI-native product company. You source when sourcing is the bottleneck, coach hiring managers when calibration is the bottleneck, and write the offer letter when the offer is the bottleneck.

• You can write a clean intake doc, sell the company to a skeptical senior candidate, and push back on a hiring manager who is grading on the wrong rubric.
• Based in (or willing to relocate to) the Seattle area; this role is on-site.

Competitive base salary, and meaningful early-stage equity.
Full benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401(k)).
Recruiting decisions are made in the room, not relayed through layers.
Eventually, you will help scope and hire the next people on it.
Avante is building with AI agents that didn't exist three months ago. Your hiring process will use the same tools we build.
They translate into concrete operating tenets that shape how we make decisions every day.

We are on by default, because we owe it to each other and to our customers to be available beyond what a regular corporate job would demand. Every white-glove dinner, every hand-built territory map, every late-night booth setup earns us the right to scale later.
Ask the question you think is too basic, because in complex domains like benefits, the cost of a wrong assumption can be a lost account. We say the uncomfortable thing early, raising missed commitments or quality gaps directly with the person within 48 hours. Customer-facing work gets priority, always. Benefits include: stock options, medical/dental/vision, and 401k We are an equal-opportunity employer and value diversity and inclusion at our company.