Founding Recruiter

Trajectory; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Trajectory is hiring a Founding Recruiter to design the operating system for talent acquisition, identifying outliers, assessing fit, and guiding them to join. This full-stack role owns sourcing, interviewing, and closing with founders.

You’ll apply first-principles thinking to make recruiting scalable, build AI-powered tooling, and partner closely with the founders to move candidates through the funnel quickly and effectively.

Qualifications

• You design scalable recruiting processes and systems.
• Experience sourcing top talent across tech and research.
• Comfort building closed-loop pipelines with founders.

Responsibilities

• Build the talent operating system for end-to-end recruiting.
• Source the top 0.1% of candidates across multiple channels.
• Close with personalized plans alongside founders.

Skills

Systems thinker

Talent sourcing

Closing talent

AI tooling

Tools

Claude Code

Grok Bot

Job description

The Role

Trajectory’s mission to build the platform for continual learning is ambitious, and requires exceptional talent to make it happen. We're hiring a Founding Recruiter to design the operating system for how we find outliers, assess their fit for Trajectory, and convince them to join. This is a full-stack recruiting role: you own the entire funnel end to end, from sourcing to interviewing to closing.

The best talent requires concerted time and effort throughout the recruiting process. We need someone who takes a first-principles, engineering mindset to talent to make the unscalable scalable, and creates new ways to hire exceptional people at speed, and is personally the person they meet.

What You'll Do

1. Build the talent operating system

• Design how we identify exceptional people, assess their fit, and attract them to Trajectory.

• Design an efficient interview pipeline that can go from first intro to offer in the shortest possible time

• Build the systems that keep someone in Trajectory’s orbit (socials, coffee chats, intros) and encode scalable context so we can tailor our process to best fit what candidates our looking for

2. Source the top 0.1%

• Run hand-sourcing as an always-on motion: talent mapping against target companies and labs, referral asks from every new hire and investor.

• Go where the best people are and aren't looking for a job — open source, papers, conferences, competition circuits, campus hubs, X and GitHub follow graphs.

3. Close

• Build a personalized closing plan for every candidate we want, grounded in their motivations, blockers, timeline, and mutuals.

• Work directly with the founders to go the unscalable last mile for every candidate, from the beginning of the process all the way to closing

Who You Are

• You are a systems thinker who turns ambiguous processes into clear decisions, processes, execution, and automation.

• You go the last mile. Finding and closing talent means hosting tailored events, identifying thoughtful gifts for candidates, and breaking process to move the needle.

• You have taste for talent in technical and unusual roles. You can tell a polished, recruiter-shaped candidate from someone who will actually do the work.

• You are an excellent communicator. You build trust quickly, convey context clearly, and adapt your message to candidates, founders, and teammates without losing precision.

• You are metrics-driven. You define the measures that matter across the recruiting funnel, inspect conversion, speed, and quality, and use the data to decide what to improve next.

• You are AI-pilled. Claude Code to build out dashboards and automations. Grok Bot to streamline comms and outreach. Any process you do twice can be systemized with AI.

• You are highly proactive and low ego.

About Trajectory

Trajectory is a research and product lab creating the platform for continual learning.

AI is the most capable software ever built, and the least able to learn. Trajectory unlocks the signal already sitting in product use so companies can continuously post-train large-scale agentic models that outperform the frontier. Working with leading AI companies, including Decagon, Clay, Harvey, Mercor, and Rogo.

Founded by researchers from DeepMind, OpenAI, Meta, Apple, Amazon, and Scale. Raised $60M from Sequoia, Conviction, along with Fei-Fei Li, Jeff Dean, and founders of Notion, Braintrust, Modal, Hugging Face, and Dropbox.