Founding Recruiter

Terac; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Meaningful equity vested over four yr

$10K relocation bonus

$5k housing bonus (0.5 miles to office

Health, Dental, Vision insurance

401(k) with company match

Job summary

Terac is building a San Francisco–based, founder-led team and seeks a recruiting lead to own internal hiring end to end. You will build the process, source top engineers and GTM talent, and close candidates who fit Terac's ambitious mission.

You thrive in ambiguity, bring strong judgment, and enjoy turning hard-to-fill roles into winning outcomes for Terac and its candidates.

Qualifications

• 2–6+ years of recruiting experience, with meaningful time at a high-growth startup or top agency.
• Track record of closing hard-to-hire engineering and GTM talent.
• Strong familiarity with LinkedIn Recruiter, Ashby (or similar ATS), and modern sourcing tools.
• Strong judgment and the ability to prioritize under pressure.

Responsibilities

• Own full-cycle recruiting: sourcing, outreach, screening, interview coordination, references, and closing across every function.
• Source relentlessly: find exceptional people through LinkedIn, Juicebox, referrals, investor networks, events, and other channels.
• Close candidates: sell the Terac vision, run offer conversations with the founders, and ensure a great candidate experience.
• Build the hiring machine: interview loops, scorecards, Ashby workflows, pipeline metrics, and an employer brand that makes Terac a place top people want to work.
• Run recruiting events: dinners, hackathons, and campus outreach to build long-term talent pipelines.

Skills

Full-cycle recruiting

Talent sourcing

Candidate closing

Judgment under pressure

Prioritization

Tools

LinkedIn Recruiter

Ashby

Job description

About Terac

Terac is building the infrastructure for accessing human capability on demand. We are working toward a future where Terac deeply understands:

1. What every person is capable of, what they want, and where they can thrive

2. What work our customers need completed and what success requires

3. What creates a great match between the two

With this understanding, Terac can intelligently allocate human capability to the work where it creates the most value for both our experts and customers. Today, our initial wedge is providing specialized experts for AI training, evaluation, market research, and other expert-driven research.

We place 1,000s of experts per month and pay our experts, on average, over $90/hr. We're a team of 15 based in San Francisco. We've raised $16M from SignalFire, Emergence, Audacious, and SV Angel, and we work with leading AI labs and research companies.

The problems we get to solve

Terac is a two-sided marketplace, and the most interesting problems live where the money moves. Some of the fun ones:

• Pricing work we've never seen before: every project is different (a cardiologist for a 30-minute interview, 200 Amharic transcribers, a team of licensed engineers building RL environments), and we have to quote it in hours, not weeks.

• Setting the right pay for experts: rates vary by domain, country, and urgency. Pay too little and the best experts walk. Pay too much and the project stops working for the customer.

• Managing spread and take rate: the gap between what customers pay and what experts earn funds everything we build, and it looks different across market research, AI training, and data collection.

• Liquidity on both sides: the right experts available the moment a customer needs them, across thousands of niches, without burning out supply or overpromising to demand.

• Moving money globally: we pay experts across dozens of countries every month, often before customers pay us, which creates real working capital, FX, and fraud challenges.

About the role

The people we hire over the next year will define Terac. Today, the founders run recruiting themselves across engineering, GTM, operations, and strategic projects roles. You'll be our first recruiter and own internal hiring end to end, partnering directly with the CEO and CTO to build a world-class, in-person team in San Francisco.

You’ll recruit the people who solve the problems above, and those problems are a big part of how you'll sell candidates on Terac.

You thrive in ambiguity, have exceptional judgment about people, and treat closing a great candidate like closing a deal.

You will:

• Own full-cycle recruiting: sourcing, outreach, screening, interview coordination, references, and closing across every function.

• Source relentlessly: find exceptional people through LinkedIn, Juicebox, referrals, our investor networks, events, and any other channel you can dream up.

• Close candidates: sell the Terac vision, run offer conversations alongside the founders, and make every candidate’s experience great, whether or not they join.

• Build the hiring machine: interview loops, scorecards, Ashby workflows, pipeline metrics, and an employer brand that makes Terac a place top people want to work.

• Run recruiting events: dinners, hackathons, and campus outreach to build long-term talent pipelines.

You have:

• 2-6+ years of recruiting experience, with meaningful time at a high-growth startup or top agency

• A track record of closing hard-to-hire engineering and GTM talent

• Strong familiarity with LinkedIn Recruiter, Ashby (or similar ATS), and modern sourcing tools

• Strong judgment and the ability to prioritize under pressure

You likely have experience in:

• Being an early or first recruiter at a startup and scaling a team through hypergrowth

• Exposure to marketplaces, AI, or technical hiring

Misc

• Compensation: Competitive salary, meaningful equity vested over four years, $10K relocation bonus (for moving to the Bay Area), and an additional $5k housing bonus (if you move within 0.5 miles of our office), Health, Dental, Vision insurance, 401(k) with company match

• Growth opportunities: You're joining Terac at one of the earliest stages and will have an opportunity to shape and grow with the company as a founding member.