Head of Talent and People, Sardine
$250-300k
Offers Equity • Offers Bonus
2+ days a week in office (Berkeley, CA)
Fraud prevention & compliance infrastructure
Be an early applicant
Fraud prevention & compliance infrastructure
201-500 employees
Be an early applicant
$250-300k
Offers Equity • Offers Bonus
2+ days a week in office (Berkeley, CA)
201-500 employees
Company mission
To remove the friction and risks associated with high velocity money movement, from banks and cards through to digital wallets and crypto.
Role
Who you are
- 12+ years in talent/recruiting and people roles, with real depth in talent
- Experience running people function at fast-paced, high-growth tech startups
- Proven experience managing a strong Talent and People team, ideally spanning both Recruitment and People Ops/HR - you know how to set direction, hold people accountable, and develop managers
- Generalist range: you're equally credible talking about an offer negotiation, a comp band, a difficult employee relations issue, or a performance management
- A player-coach mindset - you want to do the work, not just direct it
- Excellent judgment and discretion; you build trust quickly with founders, execs, and employees at every level
- Strong operating instincts: you build lightweight, scalable systems rather than heavy process
- Based in the Bay Area, with the ability to work from our Berkeley office at least 2 days every week
What the job involves
- Sardine is looking for a Head of Talent & People to lead and grow our global team
- This is a hands-on, player-coach role - you'll set direction and manage a full team of practitioners, while still staying close enough to the work to source a hard-to-fill candidate yourself, sit in on a tough employee relations conversation, or dig into a comp band directly
- You'll own Talent, People Ops, and HR Business Partnering end-to-end, with a mandate to build pragmatic systems that scale with a fast-growing startup
- Team Leadership:
- Lead and manage a team of Recruiters, People Ops/HR professionals, including any team leads within those functions
- Set goals, priorities, and capacity plans across Recruitment and People Ops/HR
- Coach, develop, and performance-manage team; build a bench of future team leads as the org grows
- Own headcount planning across the organization
- Create the operating rhythm for the team (standups, pipeline reviews, OKRs, hiring sprints) without over-processizing a still-scrappy function
- Model the player-coach standard you expect from the team - jump into the work alongside them
- Talent Acquisition (the largest part of the job. This role is Talent-heavy)
- Build and continuously improve our hiring process: interview loops, scorecards, calibration, and candidate experience
- Partner directly with the CEO and Exec team on leadership hires. Own full-cycle recruiting for key leadership roles, including sourcing, screening, and closing candidates yourself
- Build scalable sourcing channels and employer branding so Sardine competes for top talent without over-relying on agencies
- Track and report on hiring metrics (pipeline health, time-to-fill, offer acceptance) and adjust strategy accordingly
- People Operations:
- Oversee the People Ops Lead and team who own the employee lifecycle (onboarding, offboarding, HRIS administration, benefits administration, and compliance) - ensure the function runs smoothly and scales with rest of the company
- Manage and scale our existing performance review, compensation banding, leveling, and promotion cycle infrastructure - this is already built and robust; your job is to run it well, refine it as we grow, and make sure it stays credible with employees and managers
- Ensure compliance with employment law across jurisdictions where Sardine has employees, in partnership with your People Ops team
- Provide oversight and escalation support on vendor relationships (benefits brokers, payroll providers) that the People Ops Lead manages day to day
- HR Business Partnering:
- Act as a trusted advisor to managers and the leadership team on org design, team structure, performance management, and employee relations
- Partner with leaders as an internal leadership coach
- Handle employee relations issues with sound judgment, discretion, and fairness
Application process
- Deadline to Apply: September 30, 2026 at 4:00 AM UTC
Our take
Identity and payment fraud is one of the biggest dangers facing online businesses. Sardine is setting out to solve this problem by building the first zero-day fraud prevention technology.
Sardine's technology traces intrinsic behaviour patterns to identify so-called "bad actors" online, and detects fraudsters using machine-learned fraud scores and user behavior biometrics.
The company calls itself the world's first FaaS (Fraud Detection as a Service), and its solutions are already drawing business from next-gen crypto and financial service institutions. Onboarding these institutions and scaling its customer base at pace will ensure that Sardine maintains its frontrunner position.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
21% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Feb 2025
$70m
SERIES C
Sep 2022
$51.5m
SERIES B
Total funding: $145.6m
Company benefits
- Generous equity compensation
- Work from anywhere: Remote-first Culture
- Unlimited paid time off and minimum 2 weeks/year of mandatory vacation
- 100% of health insurance, dental, and vision coverage for employees and 50% for dependents
- 4% matching in 401k
- Company-wide offsites, the last one was at Miami
- MacBook Pro delivered to your door
- One-time stipend to set up a home office — desk, monitors, etc
- Monthly meal stipend
- Annual fitness allowance
- Unlimited access to an expert financial advisory
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Soups Ranjan
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously worked as Director of Data Science & Risk at Coinbase, and was Head of Crypto at Revolut.
Zahid Shaikh
(Co-Founder)Previously worked as a Senior Product Manager at both PayPal and Uber, and was Senior Product Owner at Revolut.
Salary benchmarks
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