Talent Acquisition Partner

Job Title: Talent Acquisition Partner

Team: People

Location: Onsite - Sawtelle (Between Santa Monica & West LA)

Employment Type: Fulltime, Salaried, Exempt

Reports To: VP of HR

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About Plug

Plug is an automotive fintech startup building the marketplace for electric vehicles. Consumers, dealers, and commercial partners trade in, sell, and auction used EVs through a platform built exclusively for electric, with nothing adapted from legacy automotive.

Consumers can get an instant cash offer in minutes, backed by data-driven pricing, battery state-of-health analysis, with pickup, payment, and title transfer handled end-to-end. Franchise and independent dealers across the United States bid in real time on inventory sourced directly from these consumers, dealers, and commercial partners. The result is a single platform that gives sellers a fast, fair exit and gives dealers a dedicated channel for sourcing used EV inventory.

Founded in 2023 and led by former Tesla executives, Plug has facilitated $175M in EV sales since launch and is backed by a $20M Series A from Lightspeed Venture Partners. We're building the most AI-native startup team in Los Angeles, full of operators, engineers, and ML researchers laying the transaction rails for the used EV market's exponential growth.

Why Plug

• You'll own a piece of the biggest infrastructure opportunity in automotive.

• You'll work on a platform built exclusively for EVs, with nothing adapted from legacy automotive.

• You'll be part of an AI-native company. We're rethinking how work gets done at a fundamental level.

• You'll work directly with operators who have scaled multi-billion dollar businesses in automotive, EV, and marketplaces.

• You'll have real ownership, high autonomy, and a direct line to company outcomes.

The Role

We're hiring a Talent Acquisition Partner to own full-lifecycle recruiting across engineering, ML, and go-to-market. This is a hands-on role on a lean People team with no sourcers, no coordinators, no separate closing function. You run the whole search: kickoff through offer accepted.

You'll carry 8–12 open requisitions across multiple hiring managers and functions, and you'll be a driving voice in how we hire, not an executor of someone else's process.

You'll report to the VP of HR, with a dotted line to our Senior Recruiter for day-to-day search partnership and calibration.

What You'll Own

Full-lifecycle recruiting. Intake and launch meetings, sourcing strategy, screening, interview loops, debriefs, offer construction, negotiation, and close. You prioritize your portfolio against business urgency without being told which fire is hottest.

Hiring manager partnership. Run structured kickoffs that align scope, must-haves, sourcing strategy, panel, and timeline before a search opens. Advise on market realities, leveling, and comp and push back when a plan won't work. Keep panels engaged and accountable through weekly pipeline reviews.

Proactive sourcing. Direct outreach, referrals, and market mapping not inbound triage. You'll use AI tooling to compress sourcing, screening, and market research cycles, and you'll help us figure out what actually works. Build pipelines for recurring and hard-to-fill roles ahead of need.

Interview quality and close. Design structured loops with clear rubrics and scorecards, coach interviewers on evidence-based interviewing, and facilitate debriefs that produce fast, clear decisions. Own comp conversations and close offers in partnership with the hiring manager.

Candidate experience. First outreach, scheduling, feedback timing, rejection, offer every touchpoint is Plug's brand. Find the friction and fix it.

Data you can defend. Keep Ashby clean and current, and surface funnel metrics to hiring managers and leadership so the numbers drive the conversation.

You'll also contribute to interviewer training and new hire onboarding as our process matures, not building from scratch.

What You Bring

• 5+ years of full-lifecycle recruiting in a high-growth tech environment.

• A track record of owning searches intake through close, without a sourcer or coordinator carrying pieces of the process.

• Experience recruiting both technical and go-to-market roles engineering or ML plus sales, ops, or marketing.

• Hands-on Ashby experience you can build and maintain workflows, templates, and reporting, not just work inside someone else's setup.

• Strong sourcing chops: you find and engage passive candidates directly.

• Experience advising hiring managers on leveling, comp, and search strategy with the confidence to disagree.

• Comfort in a lean team where you wear multiple hats, including your own coordination.

• Excellent written and verbal communication. You can represent Plug credibly to a senior candidate and give a hiring manager direct, useful feedback.

• Currently based in the Los Angeles area and able to work onsite in Sawtelle.

Nice to Have

• Marketplace, consumer, or two-sided platform recruiting experience.

• Experience building or delivering interviewer training.

• Exposure to employer branding or talent marketing.

• Experience in a small or scaling TA function rather than a large, highly specialized org.

Your First 90 Days

• 30 days: Fully ramped in Ashby, kickoff completed on every open req in your portfolio, first offer extended.

• 60 days: Pipeline health visible to every hiring manager you support; at least one process gap identified and fixed.

• 90 days: Owning your functions end-to-end with minimal oversight, hitting time-to-fill and offer-accept targets, and shaping how we hire going forward.

Compensation & Benefits

Annual Salary: $130,000 - $150,000

• Equity and bonus eligible

• Health, Vision, and Dental insurance

• 401(k) plan

• Daily lunch stipend

• Unlimited PTO

• 30-day remote work from anywhere program

• Fully stocked kitchen

• Dog-friendly office

• Ongoing opportunities for growth and development

This is an in-person role based in Sawtelle, between Santa Monica and West Los Angeles. We are hiring locally only candidates must already be based in the Los Angeles area. Relocation assistance is not provided, and sponsorship is not available at this time.

Equal Opportunity

Plug is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We believe diverse teams build better products.