Careers

Co-Founder & CEO

Start: Immediate

About Empathy-Engineers

We're building a way to give hiring a signal it's never had: real, structured data on empathy — the skill that predicts performance in support, sales, care, and management roles, and the one almost nobody currently measures. It's part of a bigger vision we have for recruiting, and possibly other fields as well — HR is just where we're proving it out first.

The founding team has already built and tested the product with our own HR practitioners. That includes a senior product designer and a senior product builder with deep expertise across data, AI, and software engineering, plus a technical co-founder with a background in computer science and an MBA. There's already support on the business side — we're looking for someone who wants to help shape what this becomes.

We're Amsterdam-based, and still weighing whether to raise a first round or grow further by bootstrapping. That's one of the first real decisions on the table — and one we want you to help make, not just execute on.

The role

We're looking for a co-founder to help take Empathy-Engineers into its next chapter: deciding together whether we raise or bootstrap, building the go-to-market motion, and growing the team as we move from a validated product to real customer traction.

This is a 0-to-1 role, not a caretaker position. You'll work directly alongside the founders who built the product, and help shape what the company needs most from a leader at this stage. There's no predefined playbook for this role. You'll have significant autonomy, but you'll also work closely with the founding team to figure things out together.

What we'd build together

• Funding path — helping decide whether we raise or bootstrap, then leading execution on whichever way we go: the investor pipeline, or a plan to grow without one
• Business foundation — Dutch BV formation, employer setup, and the commercial and legal groundwork the company doesn't have yet
• Go-to-market — building the first real paid relationships with HR and recruiting teams
• Strategy — shaped together with the founding team, not handed down
• Team — hiring as we grow past founder-only headcount
• External voice — investors, partners, press, the HR community

What we hope you'll bring

Fit — to the team, and especially to what we're building — matters more to us than a résumé match.

• You've led something meaningful before — a company, team, product, function, or initiative. Founder/CEO experience is useful, but it isn't a prerequisite.
• Real experience with fundraising or with bootstrapping to sustainable revenue, or a sharp, specific point of view on how you'd weigh the two for a company at our stage
• A background in HR can help, but we're just as open to other paths — what matters is how you think about people, and that you complement a team that's, by design, technical and data-driven. We've built a rigorous, rational product. We're looking for someone who can bring the other side of it to life: the story, the relationships, and the human perspective that will make people care about it.
• Comfortable with early-stage ambiguity: no playbook, limited resources, decisions made on incomplete information
• A build-measure-learn mindset — we believe in testing assumptions, learning from real-world feedback, and changing course when the evidence tells us to. You don't need to be dogmatic about any particular methodology, but you should be comfortable building iteratively rather than waiting for certainty.
• Genuine conviction that empathy is a measurable, currently-ignored signal — and curiosity about where else that idea could travel beyond HR
• A strong external communicator, since you'll be the primary voice of this company to people who've never heard of it

You don't need to tick every box

We care more about how you think, what you've built, and what you could bring to the founding team than about having followed a particular career path. If this role excites you but you don't match every point above, we'd still like to hear from you. Different backgrounds and ways of approaching problems are a strength on a founding team.

How to apply

Send a short note to hello@empathy-engineers.com on why this role, and what you'd want to know about us before saying yes.

Not sure whether you're the obvious fit? That's okay. Tell us why you're interested.

We try to reply within 24 hours. If volume is high, please give us up to 5 working days.