About Us
Our Founder
Natalija Ulemek
Natalija Ulemek is the Founder of Themis and a senior talent executive with more than a decade of experience building and scaling in house talent teams at high growth, venture backed technology companies, with a strong focus on defense and frontier tech.
She has built talent functions from first hire through rapid scale, most recently as Vice President of Talent at Merlin Labs, where she partnered closely with leadership to support growth in a highly regulated, mission driven environment. Throughout her career, Natalija has led embedded recruiting engagements, retained searches, and executive hires for complex technical organizations, always aligning hiring strategy with business goals, funding milestones, and long term success.
Through Themis, Natalija works closely with founders, operators, and investors to provide embedded recruiting, retained search, and executive search support for defense focused companies that need an experienced builder by their side.
Cara Hendley
Cara has 10+ years of full cycle recruiting experience at startup and midsize companies. Most recently she managed recruiting operations and tech recruiting at CPG startup, Thrasio during a period of extremely high growth. Previously she hired engineers and products designers Palantir Technologies, a data analytics company. She has also recruited for healthcare, higher ed, finance, and travel companies and has built tech teams in the US, Europe, Asia, and South America. She cares deeply about DEI hiring and the importance of building these practices into recruitment processes from the start. When she's not working she enjoys cooking, traveling, learning how to sail, and going to the beach with her dog.