Head of Talent

Prime-Intellect; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 250,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible work environment

Visa sponsorship and relocation help

Professional development budget

Team off-sites and conference attend

Job summary

Prime Intellect is seeking a Head of Talent to own recruiting end-to-end as we scale from ~40 to ~100 people in frontier research and infrastructure engineering. You will run the most important searches, source candidates not on the market, and close them against offers from top labs.

You’ll define how we recruit at scale, build the sourcing engine, closing playbooks, interview architecture, and compensation frameworks with founders. Equity is part of the package.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of technical recruiting experience in frontier AI labs, top AI startups, or elite tech companies.
• Direct experience sourcing and closing ML researchers or frontier talent against top offers.
• Proven track record owning senior, hard‑to‑fill searches end‑to‑end.
• Comfort operating as a player-coach; build systems and team over time.
• Strong judgment on candidate quality, leveling, and maintaining a high bar under pressure.

Responsibilities

• Own the highest-priority searches across research, infrastructure, and leadership hires.
• Source candidates directly through networks, cold outreach, and targeted campaigns.
• Close candidates against offers from frontier labs, hyperscalers, and top AI startups.
• Design and run sourcing motion for frontier research talent and elite engineers.
• Build interview architecture, rubrics, calibration, and debriefs for consistent outcomes.
• Own recruiting operations, candidate experience, and reporting end-to-end.

Skills

Technical recruiting

ML research recruiting

Sourcing & closing

Leadership & ownership

Executive collaboration

Open-source / AI networks

Job description

Head of Talent

Own Your Intelligence

Prime Intellect is building the open superintelligence stack: the infrastructure frontier AI labs build internally, made available to every ambitious AI team.

Our platform, Lab, unifies compute, environments, evaluations, secure sandboxes, high-performance training, and deployment into one full-stack system for post-training at frontier scale - from SFT and RL to tool use, agent workflows, and continuously improving production models. We are building open frontier AI: open-source models trained end to end for long-horizon tasks like autonomous research, and the full-stack platform our own research team uses to build them. The next generation of AI companies, enterprises, and research teams do not just need more GPUs. They need the ability to turn their own workflows, tools, data, and feedback loops into superintelligence they own.

Prime Intellect has raised $150M in total funding from Founders Fund, Radical Ventures, NVIDIA, and exceptional AI, infrastructure, and enterprise operators — including Andrej Karpathy, Dwarkesh Patel, and leaders and founders from Ramp, Perplexity, Harvey, Mercor, Zapier, Datadog, Cognition, OpenAI, Thinking Machines, Together AI, SemiAnalysis, LangChain, Browserbase, Cloudflare, Sierra, Databricks, Airbnb, OpenRouter, Standard Intelligence, Fleet, Core Auto, and more.

Role Impact

Talent is the single highest-leverage input at Prime Intellect. Every frontier researcher, systems engineer, and operator we hire compounds directly into what the open ecosystem can build. This role owns that compounding.

As Head of Talent, you will own recruiting end-to-end as we scale from ~40 to ~100 people over the next twelve months, weighted heavily toward frontier research and infrastructure engineering — the two most competitive talent markets in tech. You will personally run our most important searches, source candidates who are not on the market, and close them against offers from the largest labs.

Beyond individual hires, you will define how Prime Intellect recruits at scale: building the sourcing engine, closing playbooks, interview architecture, and compensation frameworks that let us maintain an exceptionally high bar while moving faster than incumbents. This is a founding recruiting leader role reporting directly to the founders, with full ownership of the function, meaningful equity, and a direct line into every strategic hiring decision.

What You'll Do

Own the Highest-Priority Searches

• Personally run our most important searches across research, infrastructure, and leadership hires

• Source candidates directly — through your own network, cold outreach, and targeted campaigns — for roles where inbound alone will never surface the right person

• 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

Build the Sourcing & Closing Engine

• 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 we need to run 60+ hires per year without dropping quality

• Define and enforce the hiring bar across the company as we scale

Systems, Team & Operational Scale

• Hire and lead a small recruiting team over time (sourcers, coordinators, and eventually recruiters), staying deeply hands‑on yourself

• Build interview architecture — rubrics, calibration, debriefs, decision‑making — that produces consistent hiring outcomes as more people participate

• Own recruiting operations, candidate experience, and reporting end-to-end

• Partner with finance and the founders on compensation philosophy, leveling, and equity strategy as we grow

Requirements

• 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 — not just "technical roles" broadly

• 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

Nice-to-Haves

• Prior experience as a founding recruiter, Head of Recruiting, or senior recruiting lead at a fast-growing technical company

• Existing network in the frontier AI research or GPU / ML infrastructure community

• Experience closing candidates against top AI lab offers

• Familiarity with open-source ecosystems and the researchers and engineers who lead them

• Background scaling recruiting operations, tooling, and interview systems at a rapidly growing company

What We Offer

• $250-300k+ cash compensation + meaningful equity

• Flexible work environment

• Visa sponsorship and relocation support

• Professional development budget

• Team off‑sites and conference attendance