Location: Remote, New York City, or Oakland, CA

Role Type: Full-time

Compensation: For employees based in the Oakland or New York City metropolitan areas, where we have offices, the salary for this role is $184,000. For employees based elsewhere in the United States, the salary for this role is $160,000.

Visa sponsorship: Not available

Hires remotely in: United States

Experience: 10 years of People Operations leadership

Recidiviz is thrilled to be hiring a Director of Talent Development to join our team! We’re a small, fast-moving group that partners with folks across the organization to attract, onboard, support and develop exceptional people who are motivated by meaningful, mission-driven work. As the Director of Talent, you will own our people strategy - from how we bring in, support, develop and grow our talent. You will bridge the gap between complex leadership decisions and team-level execution, ensuring that as we grow, no one is left wondering how decisions are made or where their career is headed.

About us

Recidiviz is creating safer, healthier communities by improving outcomes for people in the criminal justice system. We build technology to reduce the number of people in prison and to help criminal justice leaders embrace data-driven decision-making.

Using software tools and thoughtful product design, we’ve been able to safely and permanently reduce incarceration and improve outcomes. We work side-by-side with leaders of the criminal justice system, people in prison and on supervision, and ecosystem partners to build a better path forward. In addition to the revenue we earn from state partners, some of the most respected philanthropists and foundations support our work.

People who succeed at Recidiviz lead with kindness and humility, assume good intent, learn from failure, and fix problems when they see them. They are excited to work arm in arm with government leadership and staff to improve outcomes. They are great listeners. They build deep relationships with and empathy for the people we work with and the people who our mission serves, even when those two groups feel at odds.

About the role

As the Director of Talent at Recidiviz, you will own the full arc of how we find, grow, and retain the exceptional people who power our mission. This role sits at the intersection of talent acquisition, people development, and organizational culture — driving the systems and experiences that help our team perform at their best. You will lead our recruiting function from strategy to execution, while designing the manager training tracks, career pathing frameworks, and performance culture that help our people grow. You will translate annual survey insights into meaningful organizational change and bring our remote team together through intentional culture moments like our annual offsite.

This role is ideal for a builder and connector who thrives on both the strategic and the hands-on — someone energized by the idea that the right talent infrastructure is itself a force for impact.

Core responsibilities

• The Manager Experience: Design and launch tailored training tracks for different manager archetypes (High-volume vs. One-off vs. New managers).
• Performance Culture: Streamline performance reviews using Culture Amp, pivoting toward active coaching and human-first growth.
• Career Pathing: Directly address "Career Development Clarity" by developing a standardized ladder template. Collaborate with Area and Functional Leads to customize these for specific teams.
• Team Experience: Run our annual team survey, develop insights and lead organizational change initiatives to continue to build a high performing culture and impact organization.
• Coaching and Training: Coach and train leaders in one on one and group settings towards developmental leaps and high quality collaboration.
• Talent Acquisition Management: Manage and scale the recruiting function (including agency partners) to meet ambitious hiring goals. Some direct recruiting and full ownership of pipelines as needed.
• Quality of Hire: Implement a 6-month post-hire performance feedback loop to refine sourcing and interviewing criteria.
• Team culture: Drive team culture experiences like our annual offsite, building strong connections and the foundation for high-quality collaboration across a remote team.
• Compensation support: Partner with the Chief Administrative Officer to design motivating compensation experiments, aligning our compensation with our culture and impact ambitions.

Wild success

Here are things you might accomplish in your first year at Recidiviz that would demonstrate wild success in this role:

People Strategy & Culture

• Revamp the onboarding process reducing time spent by hiring managers by ½ and resulting in improved onboarding scores from new hires

Performance & Leadership Development

• Update our performance management process to scale with a growing organization, driving meaningful feedback and learning for individuals and the organization as a whole
• Build the foundation of consistent team ladders for strong career paths within the organization

Minimum qualifications

• 10+ years of People Operations leadership
• Empathy, professionalism, and the ability to communicate clearly with a diverse range of stakeholders
• Comfort using data to diagnose challenges and design solutions
• Experience working in a fast-moving startup environment
• Experience managing structured, equitable hiring practices
• Experience with Greenhouse, Culture Amp and/or other Talent software
• Coaching experience
• High-level communication skills to take a complex executive decision and frame it for a junior engineer in a way that builds trust.
• Ability to take a systems thinking approach that doesn’t just solve a one-off problem, but instead to build the "ladder template" or "framework" that solves it for the next 100 employees.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience leading Organizational Design and Talent Development
• Personal or professional experience working with the criminal justice system
• Executive coaching certification

Compensation

Compensation is standardized based on roles and responsibilities. This ensures equitable compensation and responsible stewardship of our resources. As such, we do not negotiate compensation offers.

For employees based in the Oakland or New York City metropolitan areas, where we have offices, the salary for this role is $184,000. For employees based elsewhere in the United States, the salary for this role is $160,000.

What we offer

• Effective, extremely thoughtful colleagues, working together on a mission that matters
• 90% medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage for you and your dependents
• Flexible time off, including 20 days of PTO, 3 days of paid volunteering time, and 13 paid holidays per year
• 401(k) retirement plan with 5% company match and no vesting period
• 12 weeks of paid parental leave
• Complimentary One Medical membership (availability based on location)
• Partnership with Carrot to provide employees with inclusive fertility and family-forming benefits, as well as a small but growing number of hormonal health and gender-affirming care benefits
• Monthly ClassPass credit for personal wellness
• Free mental health support via Talkspace
• Well-located offices in Oakland and Manhattan, with the flexibility to work remotely or go into either office as you choose
• An annual company offsite and other ad-hoc gatherings
• All the exhilarating challenges and stretch opportunities of a tech startup, combined with the mission-driven heart of a nonprofit

More about Recidiviz

Recidiviz was an all-volunteer effort until early 2019, when Clementine, Andrew, and Joshua founded the organization. Since then, we’ve built an A-team of software engineers, designers, product managers and domain experts, from companies like Google, Apple, Dropbox, Opower, and Sidewalk Labs. Recidiviz was part of Y-Combinator’s 2019 class and has received support from some of the most respected philanthropists and foundations, including Ford Foundation, Mackenzie Scott, Schmidt Futures, Arnold Ventures, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Mozilla Foundation.

Today, Recidiviz works with (and earns revenue from) over 19 state partners - big and small, red and blue - and touches over 45% of the country’s incarcerated population. We have helped to get hundreds of thousands of people out of the criminal justice system, safely and equitably. In addition to partnering with state Departments of Corrections, Recidiviz collaborates with and learns from partners – from organizations like the Correctional Leaders Association (CLA) to community based organizations and justice-impacted individuals, whose perspectives guide our work.

To learn more about how we do what we do, check out our 2025 Year in Review, read some press coverage, or watch our TED Talk. And if you’re really keen to see our work, you can dive into our Github :).

An important note

Lasting change is always built on diversity. Recidiviz recruits, employs, trains, compensates and promotes regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, disability, age, veteran status, ancestry, citizenship, marital status, gender identity and all protected status as required by applicable law. We consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you have a special need that requires accommodation, please let us know in your application. Even if you don't think you meet all the criteria above, drop your resume, and we'll take a look – you might be great for another role or another time!