[Hiring] Talent Engineer @People Culture Talent

Role Description

We're looking for a Talent Engineer — a senior, principal level individual contributor who owns the entire recruiting cycle and client relationship: strategy, execution, and everything in between.

You're not a sourcer who occasionally gets client-facing, and you're not a recruiter who hands off the hard problems. You're the person a founder trusts to:

• Design the hiring plan
• Write the job description that attracts the right person
• Provide strong judgement and education to run a real process
• Find and close the right candidates

This role exists for someone who thinks like an operator. You're equally comfortable in a strategy conversation with a CTO but also building innovative sourcing lists late at night because you’ve uncovered a unique angle. You build and use AI tools, not as a novelty but as leverage, so you can move faster and smarter than recruiters running a manual process.

Note: This role is fully remote, but will require on average 4-5 hours of overlap a day within the 9-6pm PT timezone due to client, team, and candidate overlap.

Qualifications

• Track Record: Independently managed full-cycle technical searches and earned the trust of a CTO or VP of Engineering quickly.
• Range: Comfortable handling all aspects of the job—sourcing, screening, client strategy, job description writing, and interview design.
• Builder's Mindset: Built or significantly improved a workflow, tool, or process, with satisfaction in automating manual work.
• AI Fluency: Daily use of Claude or comparable tools for research, drafting, and analysis.
• Creative Problem Solving: Proactively tests alternative solutions when common sourcing channels or messaging approaches don’t work.
• Judgment: Able to articulate what distinguishes a strong candidate from an exceptional one and push back on clients when necessary.
• Communication: Capable of writing job descriptions, briefing founders, coaching hiring managers, and crafting outreach that gets responses.
• Autonomy: Manages own schedule, handles multiple client relationships and searches, and makes sound decisions independently.

Requirements

• Full-cycle searches across Engineering and adjacent technical functions (Product, Design, Data, Security).
• Source and identify hard-to-find technical talent using AI-native tools.
• Assess senior and staff+ candidates with strong judgment.
• Build pipelines that go beyond inbound and referrals with creative sourcing strategies.
• Develop tools, prompts, sequences, and automations for effective searches.
• Conduct structured A/B tests on outreach messaging, sourcing channels, and process design.
• Track pipeline health, pass-through rates, and search progress to drive decisions with clients.

Benefits

• Contract-to-hire position with strong potential for permanent conversion based on performance and business needs.
• Competitive compensation provided with placement-based bonuses.

This Role Probably Isn't for You If

• You want to focus solely on either sourcing or client strategy—this role requires both, always.
• You require a fixed playbook and structure to feel confident.
• Your experience with AI tools is limited to ChatGPT, or you haven't built anything truly useful with AI.
• You require significant ramp-up time before operating independently with senior stakeholders.
• You're seeking a people management track right now, rather than delving deeply as an IC.
• You approach things with a fixed playbook and aren't excited to think from first principles.