Technical Sourcing Recruiter Job at Essential AI in San Francisco

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This range is provided by Essential AI. Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.

Base pay range

$120,000.00/yr – $200,000.00/yr

About Us

Essential AI is building an open platform to fuel and accelerate AI breakthroughs globally. Our open models, robust tooling, reproducible pipelines, and evaluation frameworks are designed for collaboration and contribution, empowering others to build, iterate, and innovate faster.

Essential AI’s technology and products shape AI advancements while supporting scalable and sustainable business models. Powerful AIs come from incremental improvements, not single breakthroughs, creating an environment that catalyzes frontier capabilities.

The Role

As a Technical Sourcing Recruiter, you will shape the future of our organization by identifying, engaging, and hiring the best and brightest minds. You will work closely with the founding team to build a world‑class team that drives foundational research and applications forward. Essential AI is on a mission to make frontier AI models and applications more accessible through an open, collaborative platform.

In this role, you’ll work with the Head of People & TA to accelerate hiring across disciplines. You excel at rapid calibration, tight feedback loops, and sustained momentum—staying close to the AI talent pool and bringing valuable insights into all parts of the hiring process.

We’re looking for recruiters who break the mold, spotting top contributors on GitHub, mining research papers, conducting bold cold outreach, and building custom sourcing mechanisms to engage niche AI/ML talent contributing to breakthrough research and products. You will be responsible for top‑of‑the‑funnel efforts.

This is a hybrid role with 2 days a week in our office in San Francisco. Remote candidates are not considered for this role.

What You’ll Be Working On

• Strategic Talent Mapping: Develop and execute innovative sourcing strategies to identify and attract top‑tier talent for Research, ML Engineering, Infra, and Product Engineering roles.
• Creative Sourcing: Utilize LinkedIn, conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR), research publications (arXiv, Google Scholar), open‑source communities (GitHub, Hugging Face), and professional networks to find exceptional candidates.
• Candidate Engagement: Serve as the first point of contact, share our vision, conduct initial screenings, assess candidates, and coordinate interviews.
• Talent Intelligence: Build candidate research and talent mapping practices to develop a pipeline of qualified candidates for current and future openings, and advise hiring teams on AI talent market insights.
• Data Driven: Continuously evaluate data to improve recruitment processes and structures, ensuring optimal stakeholder and candidate experiences; build and maintain recruiting system infrastructure and tooling.
• Partnering: Collaborate with the Head of People & TA and hiring teams to stay informed on hiring needs and execute efficient, calibrated strategies aligned with growth plans.

What We Are Looking For

• 5+ years of technical sourcing experience focused on Research and Engineering hiring.
• Proven ability to source highly specialized AI/ML roles and map AI talent movement for specific domains.
• Comfortable discussing machine learning, deep learning, NLP, or large‑scale systems concepts.
• Prioritization of speed and signal to fill critical roles with clarity.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; craft technically credible, personally engaging messages.
• Relentless drive to find top talent and deep curiosity of the AI landscape.
• Track record of creative sourcing methods that convert to high‑impact hires.
• Strategic partnership skills with stakeholders to develop solutions.
• Meticulous attention to detail and experience with ATS and recruiting software.

We encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet all qualifications; we want to see your potential.

Essential AI commits to providing a work environment free of discrimination and harassment, and to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, or veteran status. Qualified applicants are considered regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. View our EEO policy, recruitment scam notice, and recruitment agency policy for details.

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