Recruiting Operations Manager || $150k plus Equity

Recruiting Operations Coordinator | Frontier AI Lab | Palo Alto (In-Office)

We're a frontier AI lab building general-purpose world models — technology that simulates, predicts, and interacts with the real world in real time. Our research team came from DeepMind, Tesla, Waymo, Meta, and Apple. We're well-funded by top-tier VCs and scaling from ~50 to 150 people.

There is no recruiting operations function here yet. No ATS automations. No pipeline dashboards. No interviewer training program. No SOPs. No structured candidate experience framework. No onboarding workflows. No metrics reporting.

That's the job.

This isn't a traditional coordination role where you're scheduling interviews inside an existing system. You're building the system. You'll own how data moves through Ashby, how interviewers get trained and tracked, how candidates experience us from first touchpoint to offer, how hiring managers get the pipeline visibility they need, and how the entire recruiting operation scales as we triple headcount.

What you'll own:

→ ATS infrastructure — automations, stage workflows, data hygiene, and pipeline reporting in Ashby

→ Interviewer programs — training, calibration, load balancing, and capacity tracking

→ Candidate experience — communication frameworks, scheduling operations, onsite logistics

→ Dashboards and metrics — funnel health, conversion rates, time-to-fill, interviewer utilisation

→ SOPs and documentation — standardising processes as the company scales

→ Onboarding coordination — background checks, offer logistics, and new hire readiness

→ Process improvement — identifying what's broken or missing and building the fix before anyone asks

This role is for you if:

→ You've been the first or only recruiting ops person at a startup and built the infrastructure from nothing

→ You can rattle off examples: "we didn't have pipeline reporting, I built it; we didn't have interviewer training, I created it; our ATS was a mess, I rebuilt the workflows"

→ You've handled 15 concurrent roles in environments where you were the only person holding operations together

→ You've built dashboards, written SOPs, designed automations, and implemented new tools — not just used what someone else set up

→ You move fast, follow up hard, and don't wait to be told what needs doing

→ You've used Ashby, Greenhouse, or Lever — bonus if you've touched Rippling and Checkr

→ You see recruiting ops as a craft, not a stepping stone you're passing through

This role is probably not for you if:

→ Your experience is primarily scheduling interviews within an established ops team at a large company

→ You've coordinated within existing processes but haven't built them

→ You prefer structure over ambiguity

→ You're looking for a pure people-management role — this is a hands-on IC build with a path to grow