Head of Talent

Posted 6 Hours Ago
Be an Early Applicant
San Francisco, CA, USA
In-Office
Expert/Leader
Artificial Intelligence • Cloud • Machine Learning • Software
The Role
Lead Wafer’s talent function by sourcing, evaluating, and closing exceptional engineers and operators. Own priority searches end to end, partner with founders and hiring managers, improve recruiting processes and data quality in Ashby, manage recruiting partners, and build the talent team and systems needed for company growth.
Summary Generated by Built In
Head of Talent

At Wafer, we are building AI systems that automatically optimize inference workloads across silicon. The quality of our team determines how fast we can build.

We're looking for a Head of Talent to find and close exceptional people, and build the recruiting function that lets Wafer scale without lowering the bar. You'll work directly with the founders, Chief of Staff and hiring managers, and personally own our most important searches.

What you'll do
  • Find and recruit exceptional engineers and operators through direct sourcing, referrals and relationships.

  • Own searches from the first conversation through an accepted offer. You know the candidates, what matters to them and what it will take to close them.

  • Work with hiring managers to define what great looks like, design useful interviews and make decisions quickly.

  • Help candidates understand Wafer's technical work, ambition and the impact they can have here.

  • Keep the recruiting process fast and organized: clear ownership, timely feedback, reliable scheduling and accurate data in Ashby.

  • Manage recruiting partners, understand which channels produce strong hires and spend accordingly.

  • Build the talent team and recruiting systems as the company grows.

What we look for
  • You have several years of experience in talent or recruiting, preferably at a high-growth startup. You've seen what breaks as hiring accelerates and have built the systems to keep up.

  • You have personally sourced and closed exceptional technical hires. You can explain how you found them, earned their trust and helped them make the decision.

  • You understand technical hiring. Experience recruiting for infrastructure, systems, AI or similarly demanding engineering roles is especially valuable.

  • You have strong judgment and high standards. You can help a hiring manager distinguish a great candidate from someone who interviews well.

  • You build trust with candidates and move quickly without losing the details. You are willing to do the sourcing, follow-ups and coordination yourself.

  • You work without a spec. You can turn an ambitious hiring goal into a clear plan and execute it.

How we evaluate

We score every candidate on seven values:

  1. Infinitely Resourceful

  2. Exceptionalism

  3. Unreasonable Standards

  4. Company Over Self

  5. High EQ

  6. Learns Quickly

  7. First Principles Thinker

Benefits
  • Fully covered medical, dental, and vision insurance.

  • Daily lunch and dinner, unlimited PTO, and parental leave.

  • $1K/month housing stipend (post-tax) if you live within walking distance (0.5 miles) from the office.

  • Covered Uber/Waymo from/to office.

  • Visa sponsorship available.

How we work

On-site in San Francisco, five days a week. Small team with massive surface area and ownership. You operate with complete autonomy of how to solve problems.

You will build the talent function while doing the work yourself. Your success is measured by the exceptional people who join Wafer and what they help us build.

Offers Equity • Fully covered medical, dental and vision. Daily lunch and dinner. Unlimited PTO and parental leave. $1K/month housing stipend if you live within half a mile of the office. Visa sponsorship available.

Skills Required

  • Several years of experience in talent or recruiting
  • Experience at a high-growth startup
  • Personally sourced and closed exceptional technical hires
  • Understanding of technical hiring
  • Experience recruiting for infrastructure, systems, AI, or similarly demanding engineering roles
  • Strong judgment and high standards when evaluating candidates
  • Ability to build trust with candidates and move quickly while maintaining attention to detail
  • Ability to turn ambitious hiring goals into clear plans and execute independently
  • Willingness to personally handle sourcing, follow-ups, and recruiting coordination
  • Ability to work onsite in San Francisco five days per week
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The Company
HQ: Beverly, MA
7 Employees
Year Founded: 2025

What We Do

Wafer is an AI infrastructure company that makes model inference faster and more cost-efficient. Its autonomous performance-engineering agents optimize GPU kernels and the broader serving stack—including batching, scheduling, and memory layout—for open-source large language models. Wafer offers serverless and dedicated inference endpoints, routing workloads across NVIDIA, AMD, TPUs, and other silicon to provide low-latency, high-throughput APIs for enterprise and AI-native applications.

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