---
title: 'Founding Recruiter at Strella'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-recruiter-strella-new-york-yzh2e0h3g11d'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-19'
---

# Founding Recruiter at Strella

- **Company:** Strella
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-10-13
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-19
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/strella/1a002d12-6b2f-4e53-8688-adad3c790a6e

## Job description

## About Strella

Strella is reimagining market research with AI. Our platform conducts in-depth, AI-moderated interviews and transforms customer conversations into actionable insights in a fraction of the time of traditional research. We’re building a new model for market research that combines the speed and scale of AI with the strategic expertise of world-class researchers. Our mission is to make high-quality customer understanding faster, more accessible, and more impactful for every business. We're growing our go-to-market team fast. We're hiring a Customer Success Lead, a Business Development Representative and a Product Marketing Manager now, and more roles will follow. We're looking for our first Internal Recruiter to own hiring end to end. You'll build the recruiting engine and help shape the team that takes Strella to market.

Company Highlights

- Explosive Growth: We’ve more than quadrupled our annual recurring revenue over the past year, demonstrating strong demand for a fundamentally better way to conduct research.
- Enterprise Traction: Trusted by leading brands including J.Crew, Chobani, DraftKings, and to uncover customer insights and inform critical business decisions.
- Strong Investor Backing: Raised capital from Bessemer Venture Partners to accelerate our mission of transforming the market research industry.
- Massive Market Opportunity: We’re bringing AI-native technology to a $100B+ global insights industry, replacing slow, expensive research processes with a faster, more scalable approach.
- Building the Future of Research: We’re expanding beyond software into a new model of full-service insights, combining AI-powered research with expert-led strategy. You’ll be among the earliest hires helping shape this offering.

## What You'll Do

Own Full-Cycle Hiring

- Run searches from intake to signed offer across Go-to-Market (e.g., Customer Success, Sales, Marketing) and Engineering
- Work with hiring managers to define each role, its scorecard and its interview plan before the first candidate is sourced.
- Close candidates by selling a company they may not know yet, using our story, our traction and the equity opportunity.

Build the Pipeline

- Source most of your pipeline through outbound: LinkedIn Recruiter, Clay and sequencing tools, referrals and your own network.
- Keep a warm bench of talent so we can move fast when the next role opens.
- Evaluate candidates on substance, including quota attainment, deal size, sales motion and retention outcomes.

Build the Recruiting Playbook

- Build our hiring process from scratch: structured interviews, scorecards, take-home exercises, debriefs and offer approvals.
- Own the ATS (Ashby) and reporting on time-to-fill, pass-through rates and source quality.
- Make every candidate's experience fast, organized and personal, so our process becomes a selling point.

Partner With Leadership

- Work directly with our founders and GTM leaders on headcount planning, leveling and compensation.
- Advise hiring managers on market conditions, candidate expectations and how to win competitive offers.
- Help define how Strella recruits as we grow, including employer brand, referral programs and eventually technical hiring.

## Who You Are

High Impact Attributes

- Builder: You've built recruiting processes where none existed and you like the blank page.
- Hunter: You source proactively and don't wait for inbound.
- Commercially minded: You understand how GTM teams work and can tell a strong AE from someone who rode a hot market.
- People-centric: Candidates and hiring managers trust you, and you care about getting the hire right, not just filling the seat.
- Hungry and humble: You move fast, own outcomes and roll up your sleeves.

## Experience

- 4–8 years of recruiting experience, with at least 2 years in-house at a venture-backed B2B SaaS or AI company.
- A track record of closing GTM hires such as AEs, SDRs/BDRs, CSMs, solutions engineers and marketers, ideally 15+ a year.
- Experience as an early or founding recruiter at a Seed to Series C startup, or helping a team scale through hypergrowth.
- Fluency with modern sourcing tools such as LinkedIn Recruiter, Clay, Gem or similar, and an ATS such as Ashby.

## Nice to Have

- Experience recruiting for research, insights or AI-native companies.
- GTM leadership hiring (Head of Sales, VP Customer Success).
- An existing network of GTM talent in New York.

## Why Join Strella

- Build the function: You'll be our first dedicated recruiter, with a clear path to Head of Talent as the team grows.
- Direct impact: Work side by side with the founders and GTM leaders, and see your hires shape the company.
- Competitive package: Competitive compensation, meaningful equity and comprehensive benefits.

## About Strella

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Strella is an AI-powered customer research platform that automates in-depth interviews and delivers actionable human insights, enabling teams to run 100 customer interviews and get results by the next morning.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: New York, New York, United States (with offices in Poland and the United Kingdom)
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Lydia Hylton (CEO) and Priya Krishnan (COO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Customer Research, AI-powered SaaS, Market Research Technology
- **Target customers**: B2B – Product teams, UX Researchers, Marketing, Strategy, and Consumer Insights teams at enterprises and fast-growing companies (e.g., Amazon, Chobani, Daily Harvest)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “AI-powered customer research that delivers human insights 10x faster, so teams can make smarter decisions in hours, not weeks.”

## Products & Services
- **Strella Platform (AI-Powered Customer Research)**: An end-to-end SaaS platform that uses AI to moderate in-depth customer interviews, synthesize themes, and generate highlight reels and reports. Supports 46+ languages, offers access to up to 8M global participants via a built-in panel, and includes features like AI-generated discussion guides, real-time probing, and a chat interface to query research results. Covers usability testing, concept testing, exploratory research, customer journey mapping, and market research.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of $18M (Seed: $4M from Decibel Partners in Oct 2024; Series A: $14M led by Bessemer Venture Partners in Nov 2025)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Bessemer Venture Partners (lead Series A), Decibel Partners (lead Seed), Future Back Ventures, MVP Ventures; customers include Amazon, Chobani, Daily Harvest
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew 187.5% year-over-year (from ~8 to 23 employees as of May 2026); expanding globally with offices in Poland and UK; featured in VentureBeat; increasing LinkedIn following (+221.5% yearly to ~3,784 followers). The platform delivers a 90% time-saving compared to manual qualitative research and a 70% cost-saving compared to focus groups.

## Competitive Advantages
- **AI-first moderation**: AI conducts and probes interviews in real-time, removing human bias and enabling massive scalability (100+ interviews overnight) without sacrificing depth.
- **Speed + Quality combination**: Claims to eliminate the trade-off between high-quality customer research and speed, delivering synthesized insights in hours, not weeks.
- **Built-in participant panel**: Access to 8M global participants reduces recruitment friction, supporting both B2B and B2C research.
- **Multilingual capability**: Conducts research in 46+ languages, enabling global market research without translation barriers.
- **Synthesis at every level**: AI automatically analyzes themes across participants, objectives, and segments, and creates video highlight reels – making insights shareable and actionable.

## Strategic Focus
- **Product & Engineering**: Continuing to enhance the AI moderator’s intelligence and depth, expanding the chat-based insights interface, and improving the discussion guide generation.
- **Go-to-Market**: Scaling enterprise sales (adding Strategy & Operations and Account Executive roles) and building brand awareness via customer case studies and industry partnerships.
- **Global Expansion**: Strengthening presence in Europe (Poland, UK) while remaining headquartered in NYC.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Early-stage startup environment (23 people) with founders actively involved. Described as a fast-paced, high-impact place where employees shape the product and culture. Talent sourced from companies like Bain & Company, Microsoft, and Shell.
- **Remote/Hybrid Policy**: Hybrid model – expected to work on-site in either San Francisco (Engineering) or New York City (Marketing, GTM). Roles are posted as “Hybrid” (SF or NYC) or “On-site (SF or NYC).”
- **Notable Perks/Engineering Culture**: Small engineering team (7 technical staff) with high ownership and direct impact on the core AI product. Opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI/LLM applications for interview moderation and synthesis. Fast-growing company with strong investor backing and customer traction.

## Sources
1. [strella.io](https://www.strella.io/)
2. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/strella-io)
3. [tracxn.com](https://tracxn.com/d/companies/strella/__ld-clNuRbgOxWy2zCq2jX1N6BrTBniup5Qsq5ReiwkM)
4. [builtinnyc.com](https://www.builtinnyc.com/company/strella)
5. [strella.io/careers](https://www.strella.io/careers)
6. VentureBeat article (October 16, 2025) – cited in Tracxn profile

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