Senior Talent Acquisition, Engineering

Odyssey

Technical recruiter taking ownership of the hiring lifecycle for AI and engineering roles. Collaborating with founders and leads to source top talent in a competitive market.

Posted 5/19/2026full-timePalo Alto • California • 🇺🇸 United StatesSeniorWebsite

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Take ownership of the entire recruiting lifecycle for research and engineering roles—including ML research, robotics, applied ML, infrastructure, and systems engineering.
Collaborate directly with founders, research leads, and engineering managers to define role requirements, set the technical bar, and design hiring strategies for each search.
Source, engage, and successfully close senior researchers and engineers in a competitive market where many candidates have offers from top frontier labs.
Develop creative, technically informed outreach strategies, such as leveraging paper authorship, conference presentations, GitHub contributions, and lab alumni networks, to attract passive candidates who may not respond to standard recruiter messages.
Design and continuously refine calibrated technical interview loops, research interviews, screening processes, and debrief procedures for both research and engineering tracks.
Integrate AI tools (such as Claude, OpenAI, etc.) into your core workflow for sourcing, outreach, screening, and operations.
Manage the end-to-end candidate experience, ensuring a technically credible and high-touch process for every hire.

Requirements

What you’ll need

Senior-level technical recruiter with significant in-house experience at a high-growth AI, deep-tech, or research-driven technology company.
Proven track record of end-to-end hiring for research and engineering positions, including researchers, ML engineers, robotics engineers, and senior infrastructure/systems engineers.
Experienced in conducting high-stakes, high-touch technical searches, where each hire gains direct founder visibility.
Background in rapidly scaling technical recruiting organizations, with contributions to building key processes, not just following them.
Strong technical literacy; able to read papers or review repos to identify suitable candidates and ask insightful follow-up questions during screens.
Extensive technical sourcing expertise—capable of clearly articulating your approach (papers, conferences, lab networks, GitHub), beyond the tools you use.
Demonstrated success in closing candidates against offers from frontier AI labs and FAANG companies.
Regular user of AI tools in your recruiting workflow, able to illustrate how these technologies have transformed your approach.
Naturally curious and quick to learn about emerging technologies—able to effectively communicate and pitch cutting-edge research and robotics to top talent, inspiring their interest.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Competitive salary
Flexible work hours

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

technical recruitingML researchroboticsapplied MLinfrastructure engineeringsystems engineeringtechnical interview designcandidate sourcingscreening processeshiring strategies

Soft Skills

ownershipcollaborationcreativitycommunicationcuriosityinsightful questioninghigh-touch candidate experiencevisibility to foundersadaptabilityinspiration