Relay started with a simple frustration: great people and great companies kept missing each other. We built the bridge.
In 2022, Maya and David were on opposite sides of the same broken system. Maya was a VP of People spending 60% of her time sorting through unqualified applicants. David was an engineer who kept getting recruiter messages for roles that had nothing to do with his actual skills. One was drowning in noise. The other was invisible to the right opportunities.
They met at a dinner party in San Francisco and spent three hours talking about everything wrong with recruitment. The job boards were broken. The AI tools were shallow. The recruiters were expensive and slow. And candidates? They were treated like inventory, not people. By the end of that conversation, they knew they had to build something different.
Relay launched in early 2023 with a radical premise: what if AI could do the matching, but humans still made the decisions? What if speed and quality weren't mutually exclusive? What if the hiring process could be transparent for everyone involved? Two years later, over 4,800 companies and 85,000 candidates have proven the answer is yes.
What we believe
We hire humans, not resumes. Every match starts with understanding who someone is, not just what they've done. Skills matter, but so does ambition, curiosity, and the way someone thinks through a problem.
Both sides deserve honesty. We tell candidates where they stand. We tell companies what to expect. No black boxes, no radio silence, no corporate doublespeak.
Fast doesn't mean sloppy. Our AI narrows the field in hours, but every recommendation gets a human review. We move quickly because the technology does the heavy lifting, not because we skip steps.
Technology amplifies judgment, never replaces it. Our algorithms surface patterns humans miss, but the final call always belongs to a person. That's not a limitation. That's the point.
A small, obsessed team of operators, engineers, and recruiters building the future of hiring.
Maya Chen
CEO & Co-founder
David Okonkwo
CTO & Co-founder
Sarah Kim
VP of Engineering
James Rodriguez
Head of Product
Aisha Patel
Head of Talent Operations
Marcus Weber
Head of Design
Lisa Tanaka
Head of Sales
Tom Adeyemi
Head of Candidate Experience
IN THE PRESS
We're a remote-first team of 42 spread across 12 countries. We ship fast, argue honestly, and believe hiring should be humane for everyone involved. If that sounds like your kind of place, we'd love to hear from you.
See Open Roles