Recruitment Lead

London | Full-time | Hybrid | Shoreditch/Liverpool Street

We’re Making Travel Effortless. Join Us.

Travel is essential, whether it’s visiting family, starting a new adventure, or taking a career defining trip. Yet today, over 4 billion airline passengers rely on tech that hasn't changed in decades.

At Duffel, we’re rebuilding the infrastructure underpinning the global travel industry. Backed by top-tier investors (Benchmark, Blossom, Index Ventures, and Kima Ventures) and born out of Y Combinator (S18), we’re simplifying complex systems to build the future of travel.

Recruitment at Duffel

We are looking for a Recruitment Lead to both manage our in-house recruiting team and be an on the ground recruiter, partnering with leaders on recruitment strategy and ensuring we maintain a consistently high hiring bar as we scale.

About the role

What you’ll be doing

• Manage a team of recruiters setting workload priorities, running 1:1s, keeping a pulse on pipelines, and supporting their development
• Partner closely with leaders on recruitment strategy and delivery across all functions, with a particular focus on scaling technical hiring
• Maintain and improve a structured interview infrastructure so the whole team runs a consistent, high-signal process
• Use data and insight to ensure a strong recruitment infrastructure, tracking and reporting on hiring KPIs through, quality-control on pipelines, and leaning on Ashby workflows
• Be the escalation point for hiring managers when a process isn't working
• Own end to end hiring, personally running search and building pipelines on technical, senior or niche roles alongside the team

What we're looking for

• Extensive recruiting experience at a tech first company, including owning hiring metrics and reporting to senior leaders, not just running requisitions.
• Meaningful experience hiring mid to senior software engineers across the stack, with a clear view of where engineering hiring breaks down: assessment design, competing offers, counter-offers and sourcing by specialism.
• Experience leading, coaching and developing experienced recruiters, including planning team capacity against a hiring plan and rebalancing workload, rather than managing day to day.
• Strong data literacy in Ashby: you can read a hiring funnel and pinpoint where it's breaking using Time to Hire, Time to Fill, stage conversion, offer acceptance and source-of-hire data.
• Confident in forecasting capacity and demand: you can turn a hiring plan into recruiter headcount, lead times and the date each opening needs to go live, and flag early when a plan can't be delivered.
• A strategic, commercially minded approach: you can turn data into a prioritised plan with clear baselines, targets and expected ROI (e.g. agency spend versus in-house capacity).
• A quality-over-quantity mindset, with experience defining and tracking Quality of Hire and using it to steer where you source candidates and how the team hires.
• Adept at building and improving recruitment processes and infrastructure, with a strong grasp of structured interviewing, scorecards and assessment design, and a focus on great candidate and interviewer experiences.
• A champion of clean data and documentation: from interview guides to Ashby set-up (Jobs and Openings, sources, archive reasons). You keep Ashby accurate enough that leaders trust the numbers.
• Excellent stakeholder management: comfortable pushing back on hiring managers and execs with evidence when the plan or process needs it, in a fast-moving, collaborative environment.