Principal Technical Recruiter

Babylist; Ottawa; On-site; CAD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Paid holidays

Paid time off

Parental leave

Flexible benefits

Health coverage

Babylist store discount

Job summary

Babylist is looking for a high-impact tech recruiter who will own and close its most complex technical roles—senior through director level, including AI/Builder profiles. You’ll partner with engineering and product leaders, build hiring analytics, and drive calibration and process improvements across the team.

You will guide hard-to-close negotiations, design capability programs, and nurture long-term candidate relationships to fuel Babylist’s growth in new verticals.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of full-cycle technical recruiting experience.
• Ability to drive complex offer negotiations and calibrations.
• Proven track record partnering with engineering/product leadership.

Responsibilities

• Own and close Babylist’s complex technical roles across senior to director levels.
• Build and maintain hiring intelligence infrastructure (dashboards, trackers, funnel analysis).
• Present pipeline health and hiring trends to Engineering Leadership with data-driven insights.
• Lead hard-to-close offers, including above-band requests and counter-offers, with principled rationale.
• Design and run team capability programs and recruiter coaching to raise quality.
• Manage external agency partnerships with performance-driven oversight.
• Shape calibration standards and influence hiring practices beyond execution.

Skills

Full-cycle recruiting

Technical recruiting

Stakeholder management

Offer negotiation

AI in recruiting

Tools

ATS

Hiring analytics

Job description

• Babylist is at an inflection point: $750M in revenue, expanding into new verticals, and building the teams that will take us there
• You will own Babylist’s most complex and strategically important technical roles, including senior, staff, and director-level engineers, principal product managers, and emerging AI/Builder profiles
• You are a trusted advisor who sets the standard for excellent technical recruiting: calibrated, opinionated, and grounded in a genuine understanding of Babylist’s culture and how our technical teams’ work drives our long-term goals
• Day to day, this is a mix of targeted full‑cycle recruiting and team‑level infrastructure work, partnering directly with engineering directors and product leaders as a thought partner, not a service function
• Our focus is on quality: building candidate relationships over years, probing deeply enough in screens to distinguish candidates who owned an outcome from those who sat near it, and navigating offers with confidence and first‑principles comp strategy
• You become a true trusted partner to the technical leadership team
• Own and close Babylist’s complex technical roles: senior, staff, and director‑level engineers, principal PMs, and emerging AI/Builder profiles that require creative calibration and non‑standard comp strategy
• Build and maintain the team’s hiring intelligence infrastructure: finals trackers, pipeline health dashboards, and funnel analysis tools that surface bottlenecks and patterns before they become problems
• Present pipeline health, hiring trends, and forward‑looking recommendations to Engineering Leadership, with a point of view on what the data means, not just what it says
• Drive the offer strategy on hard‑to‑close situations: above‑band requests, counter‑offer re‑engagements, and role upleveling decisions, with a framed recommendation and clear rationale, not just a list of options
• Design and run team capability programs, including peer screen reviews, calibration sessions, and recruiter coaching, that raise the quality bar across the full tech TA function
• Manage external agency partnerships using performance data you build and track: submittal quality, pass‑through rates, and hire outcomes, holding partners to quality over volume
• Shape how Engineering and Product leadership thinks about hiring calibration and process, not just executing searches, but actively influencing the standards and decisions that determine who gets hired
• You’ll own the roles other recruiters can’t calibrate yet: senior, staff, and director‑level engineers, principal PMs, and the emerging AI/Builder profile we’re still defining. There’s no existing playbook. You write it
• You’ll have real influence without a title change. Engineering and Product leadership treat this seat as a strategic partner, not an order‑taker. Your read on a search changes the search
• You’ll build the infrastructure the rest of the team uses. The trackers, dashboards, and coaching programs you create for your own hardest searches become how tech TA works
• You’ll get full ownership, start to finish, on the searches that matter most to the business, with no waiting on headcount or a coordinator to hand you tasks

Benefits

• HAPPIER WEEKENDS – We work to live, not live to work. That means we generally don’t work nights or weekends, and we offer 10 paid holidays throughout the year, in addition to your paid time off.
• PAID TIME OFF THAT WORKS FOR YOU – Life is unpredictable. Use your time off for what you need, whether that’s a vacation, family event or a day to unplug.
• PARENTAL LEAVE – We offer a flexible, 12‑week paid parental leave policy.
• FLEXIBLE BENEFITS – Choose from benefits that support your working style, whether that’s remote, in the office or something in between.
• HEALTH & WELLNESS – Wellness benefits include 100% paid coverage for medical, vision and dental for full‑time employees.
• BABYLIST STORE DISCOUNT – All full‑time employees receive a generous Babylist Store discount.

You’re genuinely curious: about the market, about what strong engineering looks like in practice, about which candidates would do well in the Babylist culture, and about why a candidate hesitated and what it would take to change thatExperience driving genuinely complex offer situations: above‑band justifications, counter‑offer re‑engagements where the competing number is 2 to 3x, and role upleveling mid‑process, using comp strategy grounded in first‑principles thinking and logic, not just benchmarking dataTechnical fluency to probe engineering impact in a screen. You can speak the language with top technical talent and distinguish between elite technologists and strong subject matter expertsYou’ve acted as a mentor on your team, helping other recruiters grow. Operationally, you’ve built new tools for your team, such as a coaching program, a tracking system, a process change, or a framework that outlasted your direct ownership of it10+ years of full‑cycle technical recruiting, not supported by a dedicated sourcing function or coordinator handling the heavy liftYou naturally reach for AI in your work. At Babylist, every team uses AI daily. You’re already using it to move faster and improve your output, and you stay curious about what’s coming nextHiring manager‑level judgment: you push back when a search is miscalibrated, propose process changes before you’re asked, and make calls in ambiguous situations without needing sign‑off on every decision