About Us 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.

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.

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.

Compensation Range: $120K - $200K