What are the responsibilities and job description for the Talent Partner position at Khosla Ventures?
Company Description
Khosla Ventures, founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, is a prominent venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California. We partner with bold and innovative entrepreneurs to create impactful companies and are early investors in iconic companies like DoorDash, Instacart, RocketLab, QuantumScape, Stripe, Square, OpenAI and more. Our investments are spanning across AI, climate, sustainability, fintech, healthcare, and frontier technology. Our team is dedicated to supporting transformative ideas and helping businesses succeed from their earliest stages.
Role Description
This is a full-time, on-site role located in Menlo Park, CA at Khosla Ventures. This is a high-impact, externally facing role partnering directly with founders, CEOs, and executive teams across our companies. Talent is the single greatest differentiator for our companies. As a Talent Partner at Khosla Ventures, you will directly shape the leadership and teams that define the next generation of category-creating companies.
As a Talent Partner, your focus will be to identify, engage, and land exceptional talent - from early engineering leadership to C-suite operators - across a wide range of industries and company stages. You will also act as a trusted advisor to founders, bringing deep market knowledge, a strong point of view on organizational design, and the ability to evaluate and recruit top performers.
What You'll Do
- Partner closely with founders and leadership teams to deeply understand company strategy, culture, and immediate future hiring needs.
- Own and drive full-cycle recruiting for key technical and business roles across the portfolio.
- Develop tailored search strategies and talent maps for highly specialized, hard-to-fill roles.
- Proactively source, engage, and build relationships with world-class candidates across engineering, product, go-to-market, and operational functions.
- Guide founders on best practices in interviewing, assessment, compensation, and closing.
- Provide insight into market trends, competitive talent movements, and emerging leadership archetypes.
- Maintain a high bar for quality - prioritizing talent that can meaningfully increase the trajectory of our companies.
Qualifications
- 5 years in talent acquisition and sourcing for technical talent and/or business functions within high-growth startups or top-tier search firms.
- Strong track record filling hard-to-hire roles across technical and/or business functions.
- Executive presence with the ability to build trust and influence founders and senior leaders.
- Comfortable operating across multiple industries, functions, and company stages simultaneously.
- Energized by fast-moving environments, complex searches, and ambiguity.
- Obsessed with quality and continually raising the talent bar.
- Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field.
- Prior VC talent experience is a plus.