Role Overview

As the first Recruiter at Light Labs, you'll own hiring end to end. Hiring is the number one lever for scaling this company, and it's your job to pull it: find the best talent in the entire industry, from the best chemists and microbiologists in lab science to the Account Executives and Account Managers scaling our book of business, and get them to join us. We've grown from zero to a multi-million-dollar run rate in under 2 years, and the team you build will determine whether we reach a $50M run rate in 2027.

Responsibilities

Own recruiting end to end. You're the first dedicated recruiter. Sourcing, screening, process design, scheduling, offers, closing, and the tooling behind it all belong to you. Founders and hiring managers stay deep in the process; you run it.
Recruit across the sciences and GTM. Identify and land the best chemists, microbiologists, and lab talent in the industry, and the AEs and AMs who scale our book of business. Learn each craft well enough to know what great looks like, assess it, and sell to it.
Raise the bar. Every hire should raise the team's average. Hold the line on quality even when a req has been open too long, and push back when "good enough" shows up in a debrief. A+ talent attracts A+ talent, and you're the guardian of that.
Amp up the pace. Speed wins talent the same way it wins deals. Respond to candidates within hours, compress time from first touch to offer, and never lose a great candidate to a slow process. The best people are off the market in days.
Hunt, don't post. The best chemists and the best sellers aren't reading job boards. Source them directly: map the industry, headhunt from the labs, brands, and companies where the best people work, and build creative paths to a first conversation.
Always be recruiting. Even when we're not actively hiring, build the rolodex. Know who the best people in the industry are before we need them, keep relationships warm, and facilitate intros to our founders with people we should be talking to who may be in market.
Sell the mission. You're often the first person a candidate meets. Tell the Light Labs story with precision and conviction, and make every candidate, hired or not, leave the process impressed.
Build the machine. Structured interviews, scorecards, referral programs, employer brand, offer strategy. Document what works so recruiting scales past you.
Use AI to out-recruit everyone. Personalize outreach to the person, their work, and their world. Bring a level of polish and relevance to candidates that no other company in this industry matches.
Scale impact. Help drive Light Labs to a $50M run rate in 2027 by making hiring our sharpest competitive edge.

Requirements

We're open on background: agency, in-house, or unconventional. What matters is the track record.

Proven full-cycle recruiting results. You've personally sourced, run, and closed hires, and you can walk us through the best ones: how you found them, how you won them, and what they went on to do.
Range across functions. You've recruited beyond one lane, ideally spanning technical or scientific roles and commercial ones, and you know how to calibrate what great looks like in a domain that's new to you.
A sourcer at heart. You don't wait for applicants. You headhunt, and you have creative, repeatable ways of reaching people who aren't looking.
A demonstrated high bar. You can point to hires where you held out for better, and you're comfortable telling a founder no on a candidate.
Relentlessly responsive. Operates with urgency and treats speed as a competitive advantage, not a courtesy.
Excellent communicator. A sharp storyteller and closer, in writing and in person, who can represent Light Labs to a PhD microbiologist and an enterprise seller in the same day.
Entrepreneurial mindset. Operates independently, thrives in ambiguity, and builds structure where none exists. You'll be defining recruiting here, not inheriting it.
Mission-aligned. Motivated by improving transparency and integrity in the food system.
Austin, TX (in-office 5 days per week). This role sits side-by-side with the founders and broader team as we scale Light Labs.

Who We Are

Light Labs is building the modern platform for lab testing, starting with consumer goods brands. We help companies test more cheaply, quickly, and enable them to use lab results to automate regulatory compliance and grow revenue.

We believe consumers deserve to know the purity and accuracy of every product that affects their families' health. Improving our food system starts with increasing transparency and creating a more informed customer. Not only are we building a lab that makes testing faster, cheaper, and easier, but also the infrastructure that allows brands to:

Market and highlight their lab results by making it easy to push lab data directly to product display pages. Here, brands will highlight what's in their product (active ingredients + they meet their claims) and what's not in their product (heavy metals, environmental toxins, PFAs, etc)
Automatically comply with regulations like Prop 65, CA AB 899, Amazon testing requirements, etc.

By integrating the full experience – from testing to the data sharing with customers – we're building a more efficient and streamlined process. Brands can now differentiate themselves and become the no-brainer choice in their category through testing and great transparency.

We're a team of experienced founders that have raised $30M+ from top VCs (8VC and Valor), with top CPG founders and strategics who participated into the round. Whether you're lab tech, engineer, sales, marketing, or customer support, you'll have a seat at the table as we work to increase transparency in the food system.

Our Mission

Almost everything people consume is becoming increasingly toxic (and bereft of nutrition) which leads to massive health dysfunction while simultaneously destroying our planet. No one knows about it because you can't see, taste, smell, or quantify the problem:

Cinnamon Apple Puree pouches, marketed for children and labeled as preservative-free, kosher, and gluten-free, contained lead levels 200 times greater than the FDA's proposed guidelines
Over 1300 chemicals are banned in cosmetics in the EU, while only 11 are in the United States
The US also allows thousands of food additives which are banned in other countries
A study of 168 baby foods revealed that 95% contained at least one heavy metal (arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium), with a quarter containing all four
Seven out eight samples of kale contained 'disturbing' levels of PFAs, with organic kale containing higher levels of the toxic compounds

Today, even if consumer brands or manufacturers wanted to test for purity of their products, the experience is slow, cumbersome, expensive, and nearly impossible to interpret or share the lab results unless you have a PhD in the area you're testing for.

Because there is no feedback loop or standardized transparency that brands offer, there is no consumer pressure on change of practices and sourcing. If people knew what was in their food, they'd be shocked. They would shop differently.

Our mission is to bring this transparency to the food system. Allow customers to buy products and brands that are free of toxic ingredients. Transparency is the first step in creating demand for cleaner products, and ultimately a cleaner supply chain.

Founding Team

Nick Mares: 2x founder, Kettle & Fire and Upside Financing. Kettle & Fire is a $100 million/year brand while Upside Financing exited in 2022. He's raised more than $60M across the two companies and been both in the CEO and COO roles. Nick is a Thiel Fellow.
Vijay Manohar: growth and GTM leader. He helped Samsara scale to be one of the fastest growing B2B software companies ever to reach $1B ARR, including an IPO (NYSE: IOT). B.S. in computer engineering from UT Austin.

Values We're Looking For

First Principles
We're looking for team members who can deal with ambiguity, deconstruct problems, and build the optimal solution.
Question every requirement → Delete any part or process you can → Simplify and optimize → Accelerate cycle time → Automate.
Standard of Excellence
High standards are contagious. A+ talent attracts A+ talent.
There's a glut of mediocrity in the world. We're chasing after the products and people that strive for excellence.
Bias for Action
Take initiative, make decisions quickly, and have a willingness to experiment and learn from failures.
Customer expectations are not static. They rise over time, which means we have to continuously improve every single day.
Low Ego
Coachability; it's not about being right, it's about getting to the right answer.
Reacts calmly to criticism or negative feedback, and has a "feedback is an opportunity for information and improvement" mindset.
Respectfully challenges decisions when you disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable. Once a decision is made, even if you still disagree, commit wholly and move forward.

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