Senior Talent Acquisition (Techncial) | $160K–$200K base + bonus & equity

Senior Technical Recruiter

Palo Alto, CA (Hybrid)

$160K–$200K base bonus & equity

Our client is building general-purpose world models. Not video generation. Simulation. Persistent world state, real-time interaction, agent-ready. They are backed by tier-1 investors, including GV, EQT, and NVentures (NVIDIA)

They are 50 people scaling fast, and every research and engineering hire is high-impact, founder-visible, and fiercely competitive. We need a senior technical recruiter who can find, engage, and close the kind of researchers and engineers who get recruited by every frontier lab in the world and win.

What you'll own

Full-lifecycle recruiting across ML research, robotics, applied ML, infrastructure, and systems engineering. You'll partner directly with our founders, and research leads to define requirements, calibrate the technical bar, and close exceptional people.

This means sourcing from papers, conference output (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, RSS, CoRL, CVPR), GitHub, lab alumni networks, and open-source communities, not just running Boolean searches. You'll build the outreach strategies, employer brand, and structured hiring processes that let a 50-person company compete with labs 10x our size.

What we're looking for

• 6 years of in-house technical recruiting at a high-growth AI, deep-tech, or research-heavy company
• Track record of filling research scientists, ML engineers, robotics engineers, and senior infrastructure/systems roles end-to-end
• Deep technical sourcing expertise — you can describe your methodology, not just your tools. You've built recruiting processes (scorecards, rubrics, interview loops, pipeline reporting), not just operated within them
• You use AI tools daily in your recruiting workflow and can show how they've changed the way you work. Strong closing instincts against competing offers from frontier labs and FAANG/MANGO
• Technically curious; you can read a paper or repo well enough to identify the right candidates and have a credible conversation

Bonus Points if...

• First or early in-house recruiter at a startup — you've built from scratch
• Background at a frontier AI lab, robotics company, or research org
• Familiarity with Ashby
• Existing network among ML, RL, robotics, or systems researchers
• Experience hiring VP/C-suite for non-engineering functions

This is a hands-on IC role. If you've been managing and want to get back to the craft at a company where every hire matters, we'd like to talk.