Technical Sourcing Recruiter

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 have the means to shape AI advancements while supporting scalable and sustainable business models. Powerful AIs don't trace their origins to singular breakthroughs, but from an amalgam of improvements, incremental and large. Essential AI creates the ideal environment to catalyze these advancements, enabling a steady path to sustained frontier capabilities.

The Role

As a Technical Sourcing Recruiter, you will be helping shape the future of our organization by identifying, engaging, and hiring the best and brightest minds. You will be working closely with the founding team to help 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 the hiring efforts across disciplines. We value building a high-performing team through an effective, high-velocity process - designed to help us move faster while identifying strong domain experts. You excel at rapid calibration, tight feedback loops, and sustained momentum - staying close to the AI Tech pool, and bringing valuable insights into all the parts of the hiring process is a requirement.
We’re looking for recruiters who break the mold, spotting top contributors on GitHub, mining research papers, executing bold cold outreach, and building custom sourcing mechanisms to engage with niche AI/ML talent contributing to breakthrough research and products. We are committed to making selective hires that strengthen the team, and 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. We are not considering remote candidates 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 roles in Research/ML Engineering, Infra, and Product Engineering roles.

• Creative Sourcing: Beyond LinkedIn, utilize a variety of channels, including academic conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR), research publications (arXiv, Google Scholar), open-source communities (GitHub, Hugging Face), and professional networks, to find exceptional candidates.

• Candidate Engagement: As the first point of contact and face of Essential AI, you will share our vision and story to engage with passive and active talent. Conduct initial screenings, candidate assessments, coordinate interviews etc.

• Talent Intelligence: Build candidate research and talent mapping practices to develop a pipeline of qualified candidates for current and future openings. Serve as a strategic advisor to the hiring team to ensure that we are making informed hiring decisions by staying close to AI Talent Market and Talent Intelligence.

• Data Driven: Constantly utilize and evaluate data to seek out improvements in the recruiting process and structure to ensure optimum stakeholder and candidate experiences. Build out and maintain recruiting system infrastructure and tooling

• Reliable Partner: Collaborate with Head of People & TA and hiring team to stay close on hiring needs, and execute efficient & calibrated hiring strategies that help keep the velocity of hiring in line with our growth plans.

What we are looking for

• 5+ years of experience in technical sourcing; with a focus on Research and Engineering hiring is required.

• A proven ability to source for highly specialized AI/ML roles. You have a good grasp on talent insights, and can map movement of AI talent for specific domains.

• You are comfortable discussing concepts related to machine learning, deep learning, NLP, or large-scale systems, or have a deep interest in learning other complex roles.

• We prioritize speed and signal, filling critical roles with clarity and staying close to the pulse of the organization.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to craft messages and outreaches that are both technically credible and personally engaging.

• A relentless drive to find the best talent and a deep curiosity about the AI landscape that fuels your search and partnership with the team.

• A track record of creative sourcing methods to attract top talent and convert them into high-impact hires.

• Ability to strategically partner with stakeholders to develop creative solutions.

• Have excellent verbal and written communication skills. Meticulous attention to detail and experience using applicant tracking systems (ATS) and other recruiting software to manage candidate pipelines.

We encourage you to apply for this position even if you don’t check all of the above requirements but want to spend time pushing on these techniques.
Essential AI commits to providing a work environment free of discrimination and harassment, as well as equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. You may view all of Essential AI’s recruiting notices here, including our EEO policy, recruitment scam notice, and recruitment agency policy.