Felix van der Vaart

Vice President of Business Operations @ Mach Industries

Los Angeles Metropolitan Area

About

Assume best intent and win as a team.

Experience

  • Vice President, Business Operations at Mach Industries
    Jan 2026 - Present · 6 mos

    Responsible for People (Recruiting and HR), IT, Security and Facilities for Mach. Laser-focused on warp-speed design-to-manufacturing in the defense and intelligence industry. $470M Series B (Sequoia, Khosla, Bedrock) --> $1.8B Series C (Sequoia, Khosla, Infinite, Ribbit) https://www.machindustries.com/

  • SpaceX (On-site)
    • Senior Director of Recruiting
      Nov 2024 - Jan 2026 · 1 yr 3 mos

      Global recruiting leader for our talent team of 100+ recruiters and operational staff to find and hire the best to make the human species interplanetary

    • Director of Recruiting
      May 2024 - Nov 2024 · 7 mos

      Global recruiting leader for our talent team of 80+ recruiters and operational staff to find and hire the best to make the human species interplanetary

    • Head of Talent Operations and Executive Recruiting
      Feb 2024 - May 2024 · 4 mos

      Leading both our recruiting operations and leadership recruiting functions and associated teams spacex.com/careers

  • Senior Strategic Executive Recruiter, Emerging Initiatives at Amazon
    2022 - 2023 · 1 yr

    The Emerging Initiatives Team supports Amazon's uncharted but high-impact interests, special projects, and startups. In stealth mode, we dive deep into new domains to build internal capabilities and teams that will enter or extend Amazon’s footprint in these greenfield spaces. Our mission is exploration. We craft the strategy to hire executive leaders and scientists, build and acquire teams, partner and collaborate with research entities; and then we execute it. A few areas include healthcare, robotics, space, computer vision, autonomous driving, climate risk, automated reasoning and cryptography. We’re at the forefront of cutting edge technology.

  • Google (Full-time · 3 yrs 1 mo)
    • Growth Strategy Manager, Google Workspace (StratOps)
      2021 - 2022 · 1 yr

      Corporate Strategy Manager focused on growing Google Workspace and Google Cloud. Deep focus on Productivity & Collaboration software market landscape, potential partners and acquisition targets, and overall GTM narrative creation for Google Cloud's salesforce and their third-party partners and vendors. Led GTM launch for Work Safer, an offering demonstrating the best of Google Cloud's in-house security features (Chronicle, BeyondCorp [zero trust], reCAPTCHA), Google Workspace, and our partners. Offering was announced at Google Next '21 and presented by CEO Sundar Pichai and Google Cloud President Thomas Kurian.

    • Executive Recruiter, Google Cloud
      2019 - 2021 · 2 yrs

      GTM (Sales, Customer Engineering) and Technical Post-Sales Leadership

  • Senior Associate at Korn Ferry
    2018 - 2019 · 1 yr

    Global Technology Practice - Executive Search and Advisory