Staff Technical Recruiter

Description

The company builds robots that build robots, deploying advanced assembly and production capability for robotics firms and for hardware where national security is at stake.

It is rebuilding American manufacturing around AI, assembly and dual-use contract work, and it is staffed by a small founding team with direct influence over product, culture and results.

The role is 100% in person at the Emeryville, CA office.

Responsibilities

• Own hiring from start to finish for robotics and AI/ML research roles in manipulation, perception, controls, learning and the ML infrastructure around them, for both research scientists and research engineers.
• Treat sourcing as a research discipline: read the papers and build candidate lists from conference author lists, acknowledgements and citation trails, as well as GitHub.
• Build lasting relationships with university labs and faculty, since advisors often steer their students more than recruiters do.
• Use AI tooling to multiply your own reach 10x through enrichment, matching papers to profiles and outreach at volume that still reads as if a person read the work. The company funds the tools; you run them.
• Before opening any requisition, build a competency map with the hiring manager, break each role into separate assessable skills, and give each interviewer one skill to assess.
• Build and run interviewer training and calibration for research interview loops, including how to assess research taste as well as implementation skill.
• Analyze talent competition from frontier labs, robotics startups and autonomous vehicle companies, and be able to explain honestly why a researcher should choose the company over a lab with a larger compute budget.

Requirements

• 8+ years of technical recruiting, including hiring research scientists or research engineers in robotics, AI/ML, autonomy or a closely related field.
• Read research papers well enough to explain what a candidate's work contributed, in terms a researcher would accept.
• Know the field: its labs, advisors, conferences and how people move between them.
• Have built faculty and lab relationships that produced hires, not just campus visits.
• Be highly effective with AI tools, with tooling you have built or run that multiplied your sourcing output, and be able to walk through your stack.
• Be genuinely interested in the technology. Anyone who mainly wants a clean requisition and a fixed close date will not fit this seat.
• Have built a competency map yourself and be able to show one.
• Have a technical background, whether a degree, a research stint or self-taught depth you can defend.
• Have experience hiring into ITAR-controlled or cleared programs and understand the constraints that come with them.
• Have recruited where research has to hold up in production.
• Bring a founder mindset: move fast, take ownership, find a way forward when the path is unclear, and take smart risks. A role with a defined lane, a predictable pace and all answers provided up front may not suit you.
• Be able to sell equity at an early-stage company. Cash pay is not Big Tech level, so you must know what sets the company apart.
• Work without a sourcing team beneath you, as the senior recruiter who is also reading papers in the evening.
• Accept that the strongest candidates are rarely looking and often decline, so the work is long-term relationship building rather than pipeline volume.
• Assess research quality you cannot fully judge yourself, and design a loop that can.

Conditions

Full-time, 100% in person at the Emeryville, CA office.

Base salary range for this role in Emeryville is $170,000 to $205,000 USD.

Pay reflects a minimum and maximum target for new hires, set by location and by factors such as job-related skills, experience, interview performance and education or training.

The company practices ethical hiring.

Benefits

• Equity for eligible roles, subject to Board of Directors approval.
• Comprehensive health, dental and vision coverage.
• Generous PTO.
• Daily work alongside manufacturing operators, mechanical engineers, robotics researchers and software engineers on production systems.