[Hiring] Senior Talent Partner @Ably (UK)

Role Description

As the Senior Talent Partner at Ably, you'll be our sole in-house recruiter, reporting to our VP of People and owning hiring end-to-end, from calibrating the brief with the hiring manager through to signed offer. You’ll be responsible for everything that makes hiring work:

• How we interview
• The tools we use
• How we source
• How candidates experience Ably

In a 60-person company, every hire changes the team, so this role exists to raise the bar:

• Looking wider than the first good candidate
• Pushing back when a brief is off
• Making the case for waiting when the evidence isn't there
• Judging your success by who is still thriving a year in, not how fast we filled the seat

You'll run full-cycle recruiting across the company, but engineering is where the depth matters most. You'll understand what we build well enough to hold a credible conversation with distributed systems engineers, tell depth from polish, and explain why our problems are worth their time. You'll work closely with hiring managers, right up to our CTO.

Day to day, you will:

• Calibrate hiring briefs before we go to market
• Work with each hiring manager to turn complex technical requirements into a clear picture of who we need, and give honest feedback when the brief needs to change
• Find and close great people
• Run outbound sourcing, screens and interviews, and close offers for engineering, GTM and other roles, supporting offers and compensation conversations alongside our People team
• Make our interviews better
• Build on our structured interviews and scorecards so every process is fair, consistent and good at telling depth from polish
• Get more out of our tools, with AI at the centre
• Make the most of Greenhouse and our hiring reporting, and put AI to work across sourcing, outreach, screening and admin so more of your time goes to the conversations that need a person
• Manage and negotiate our agency relationships
• Decide where agencies add the most value, set the terms, and hold them to account
• Be Ably’s voice with candidates and the technical community
• Shape our employer brand and candidate experience, and make sure new hires land well before they start

Qualifications

• A track record of finding and closing high-calibre engineers, ideally in infrastructure or distributed systems, and the technical grounding to earn engineers' respect
• Strong judgement when partnering with hiring managers: calibrating a brief, giving honest feedback, and running a structured, fair interview process
• Proven full-cycle recruiting experience, ideally as the sole or lead recruiter in a start-up or scale-up, hiring across the UK and Europe
• Hands-on outbound sourcing and market mapping, with the numbers to show what works, and a habit of using AI in how you work
• Experience managing recruitment agencies, including negotiating terms and holding them to account

Requirements

• Experience hiring for developer tools, AI, or open source companies (bonus points)
• A background in agency recruiting (bonus points)
• Familiarity with Greenhouse ATS (bonus points)
• An active presence in tech or recruiting communities, online or in person, and comfort being a public face for Ably (bonus points)

Benefits

• A remote-first and flexible work environment
• Equity through our EMI share options programme
• Enhanced holiday allowance: 28 days of paid annual leave (27 regular days, plus a day off to enjoy your birthday)
• Enhanced parental leave: up to 16 weeks fully paid for primary caregivers and 4 weeks for secondary, depending on length of service
• A home workstation budget of £500 on joining (and £150 per year after that)
• A personal learning and development budget of £1000 a year, plus 5% L&D time during working hours
• Private healthcare with BUPA
• A medical cash plan covering a range of medical and dental costs
• Mental wellbeing coaching and counselling from Self Space
• A monthly wellbeing budget via Juno
• Life assurance and income protection
• Access to Tech and Cycle to Work schemes
• A weekly snack allowance for our end-of-week "Need to Know" meeting
• A fully-paid one-month sabbatical after five years with Ably