About Jumpstart
Recruitment sucks. It really does:
- Candidates hate the job hunt (ghosting, endless job descriptions, endless rejections).
- Startups hate hiring (hard to find top candidates, hiring mistakes are costly).
- Recruiters are meant to fill this gap. They can optimise for either speed or quality, but cannot do both.
Jumpstart does. How?
- We ensure quality by creating an excellent user experience (e.g. via Dragons’ Den esque pitches) that attracts 5000+ applicants every month. We carefully handpick the top 1-2% and onboard them onto our platform.
- We ensure speed with our tech platform that enables candidates and startups to matchmake immediately.
- Indeed, startups tell us what they think of us - see our ‘wall of ❤️’.
- We have doubled revenue in 2025, placing c.400 candidates. Our model works, is scalable, and we have been profitable from day one.
- Oh and we’ve done all of this without having to take on any external investment. That means no investors breathing down our necks.
About the Role
TL/DR
We are looking for a CTO or Senior Engineer to help Jumpstart break into the world of technical hiring - setting up the systems and processes we need to select and place the best junior to mid level engineers at startups.
A bit of context
- Jumpstart has primarily been focused on non-technical hires (e.g. ops, generalist, sales, marketing) with strong penetration in the seed & series A startup market.
- We have LOTS of demand from our startup partners for help with technical hiring (starting with junior to mid level as this is where we are best placed to execute).
- However, we need a real expert who has (a) worked for a number of years as a Software Engineer in a startup and (b) has hired and recruited engineers to help us make this happen.
Core activities
- 🔈 Candidate acquisition & marketing: whether it be through content, direct sourcing, hackathons, or events - experimenting with the best way to find the top candidates for these startups. You will be able to leverage the Jumpstart brand & content creation resources to get there.
- 🏆 Candidate selection: use your expertise to find the best way to evaluate these candidates to make sure they are truly exceptional AND want to build in early stage startups.
- 🚀 Feedback loops & driving success: working with candidates & the CTOs at our startups to work out what makes them tick (and earn yourself some ££, more on this below).
About You
Must have
- At least 5 years experience as a Software Engineer in startups, ideally as a CTO or building from 0-1.
- Experience hiring & managing Software Engineers, especially at a junior to mid level, with a clear idea of what does or doesn’t work.
- Keen interest in the startup talent space, with strong opinions on how we could make this work!
- Ability to fully commit to at least 3 months. We need someone who can fully commit, doing everything from posting on LinkedIn to garner interest, to running technical challenges and hackathons with potential candidates.
What we’ll offer in return
- 💸 Financial compensation:
- Base salary of £7,000 per month (i.e. £84k annualised).
- 50% of any fee Jumpstart earns on a Software Engineer placed, which would be approx. £5000 per hire, although this would be uncapped - so unlimited upside!
- If you help us place 5 engineers in 3 months (for context, we place c.50 candidates per month currently so very doable), this would be a total package of £46,000+ for 3 months work (£180k+ annualised).
- 💻 Working directly with our founder & CTOs:
- You will work directly with our co-founder Kabir on a day to day basis, as well as with our massive network of 500+ CTOs looking to hire our candidates.
- 📈 Building 0-1:
- This role is IDEAL for a CTO or technical person who is looking to found in the future, and wants to learn how set an operation up from scratch, from a team who has done this very successfully so far with a VERY sticky customer base. See below for a message sent from one of our customers in anticipation…