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Head of Talent

Prime Intellect· Finance / Operations
Apply on company site
San Francisco$250k - $300kFull-timePosted 2mo ago

About the role

Founding recruiting leader role responsible for owning recruiting end-to-end as Prime Intellect scales from ~40 to ~100 employees, with a focus on frontier research and infrastructure engineering, building the sourcing engine, closing playbooks, interview architecture, compensation frameworks, and eventually leading a recruiting team.

Responsibilities

  • Personally run our most important searches across research, infrastructure, and leadership hires
  • Source candidates directly through network, cold outreach, and targeted campaigns
  • Close candidates against competing offers from frontier labs, hyperscalers, and top AI startups
  • Serve as a trusted partner to the founders and hiring managers on candidate strategy, leveling, and offer construction
  • Design and run the sourcing motion for frontier research talent (labs, PhD programs, top open-source contributors) and elite systems engineering talent (distributed systems, GPU infrastructure, ML systems)
  • Build closing playbooks that reflect what actually moves technical candidates: research autonomy, compute access, publication norms, equity, and mission
  • Stand up the tooling, data, and pipeline visibility to run 60+ hires per year without dropping quality
  • Define and enforce the hiring bar across the company as we scale
  • Hire and lead a small recruiting team over time (sourcers, coordinators, and eventually recruiters) while staying hands-on
  • Build interview architecture — rubrics, calibration, debriefs, and decision-making for consistent hiring outcomes
  • Own recruiting operations, candidate experience, and reporting end-to-end
  • Partner with finance and founders on compensation philosophy, leveling, and equity strategy as we grow

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of technical recruiting experience, with meaningful time at a frontier AI lab, top AI startup, or elite technical company
  • Direct experience recruiting ML researchers, frontier research talent, or elite systems / distributed engineers
  • Proven ability to source and close candidates who are not actively looking, against competing offers from top labs
  • Track record of personally owning senior and hard-to-fill searches end-to-end
  • Comfort operating as a player-coach: running your own searches while building the systems and eventually the team underneath you
  • Strong judgment on candidate quality and leveling; willingness to hold a high bar under pressure
  • High ownership, direct communication, and appetite for working closely with founders on the most consequential decisions in the company
  • Energized by building a recruiting function from the ground up in a fast-moving environment

Skills

Required:Technical recruitingSourcing strategyClosing candidates

Benefits

  • Flexible work environment
  • Visa sponsorship and relocation support
  • Professional development budget
  • Team off-sites and conference attendance
Last updated Aug 12, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Prime Intellect

Commoditizing Compute & Intelligence

Prime Intellect democratizes AI development at scale. Our platform makes it easy to find global compute resources and train state-of-the-art models through distributed training across clusters. Collectively own the resulting open AI innovations, from language models to scientific breakthroughs.

AI developmentbessemer-ai-infrastructure-2026compute resourcesdistributed trainingmodelsreinforcement-learning-platformsscience
Company profileWebsite

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