Principal Technical Recruiter

Babylist; Northern (KY); On-site; USD 179,000 - 218,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work stipend

Medical, dental, vision insurance

Retirement plan with company match

Parental leave

Job summary

Babylist is seeking a senior talent acquisition partner to own and close its most strategic technical roles, partnering with engineering and product leadership. This remote-first team uses AI daily to move fast and raise the bar in hiring quality.

You will lead end-to-end recruiting for senior- to director-level roles, influence compensation strategy, and build scalable hiring infrastructure across U.S. and Canada. Experience with complex offer negotiations is essential.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of full-cycle technical recruiting experience.
• Experience driving complex offer situations with above-band justifications.
• Strong hiring-manager judgment in ambiguous situations.
• Mentor to team; built tools like coaching programs or trackers.
• Curiosity about market, engineering practices, and Babylist culture.
• Proficiency with AI tools in recruiting and workflow optimization.

Responsibilities

• Partner with engineering directors and product leaders as a thought partner.
• Own and close Babylist’s complex technical roles: senior, staff, and director-level engineers, principal PMs, and emerging AI/Builder profiles.
• Build and maintain the team’s hiring intelligence infrastructure: finals trackers, pipeline dashboards, funnel analysis.
• Present pipeline health and hiring trends to Engineering Leadership with data-driven insights.
• Drive the offer strategy on hard-to-close situations with clear rationale and framing.
• Design and run team capability programs, including peer screen reviews and coaching.
• Manage external agency partnerships using performance data and outcomes.
• Shape how Engineering and Product leadership thinks about hiring calibration and process.

Skills

Technical fluency

10+ years recruiting

Complex offers

Hiring manager judgment

Mentor recruiters

AI in recruitment

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.

Who You Are

• Technical 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 experts.
• 10+ years of full-cycle technical recruiting, not supported by a dedicated sourcing function or coordinator handling the heavy lift.
• Experience 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 data.
• Hiring 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.
• You'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 it.
• 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 that.
• You 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 next.

How You Will Make An Impact

• 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.

Why This Role

• 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.

About Compensation

We use a market-based approach to compensation. The starting salary range for this role is:

$179,400 to $218,000 + target 20% annual bonus and competitive equity

Your starting salary will be based on your location, experience, and qualifications, with increases over time tied to performance, role growth, and internal pay equity.

Who We Are

Babylist is the leading platform for expecting and new families. More than 10 million people shop with Babylist every year, making it the go-to destination for seamless purchasing, guidance, and expert recommendations. As a modern, AI-forward tech company, Babylist has expanded from a universal registry into a full ecosystem - the Babylist Shop, Babylist Health, Babylist Money, NYC and LA showrooms, branded content, and more - generating $750M in revenue in 2025. Building the generational brand in baby, Babylist is reshaping the $235B kids and baby market and helping parents feel confident, connected, and cared for at every step.

Our Ways of Working

Babylist is remote-first with team members across the U.S. and Canada who move fast, think smart, and use AI as part of how they work every day - not as an experiment, as an expectation. We come together twice a year to build the relationships behind the work, and we hire people who are genuinely excited about what's possible and prove it through how they show up.

Why You Will Love Working At Babylist

Our Culture

• We work with focus and intention, then step away to recharge
• We believe in exceptional management, and we invest in the tools and the time to connect with colleagues
• We build products that positively impact millions of people's lives
• AI is part of how we work, not a side experiment. You'll have leading tools like Claude and ChatGPT from day one, with no waiting on access, so the busywork gets handled and your judgment goes where it counts

Growth & Development

• Competitive pay and meaningful opportunities for career advancement
• We believe technology and data can solve hard problems
• We're committed to career progression and performance-based advancement
• Company-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Retirement savings plan with company matching and flexible spending accounts
• Generous paid parental leave and PTO
• Winter Wonder Week: the whole company takes a paid week off at the end of the year, whether or not you celebrate anything, so everyone's out at once and comes back refreshed
• Remote work stipend to set up your office
• Perks for physical, mental, and emotional health, parenting, childcare, and financial planning

Recorded Interviews.Babylist uses an interview recording tool to record and transcribe interviews for evaluation purposes in accordance with applicable privacy laws. By participating in an interview, you consent to this recording and transcription.

Interview Integrity.AI is part of how we work at Babylist. We expect you to use it too. Your application and interviews should still reflect you and your own thinking. We'll tell you when AI is encouraged. Misrepresentation at any stage may result in removal from consideration for this and future roles.

How We Review ApplicationsWe use AI throughout our hiring process to help review, screen, and assess applications. These tools support our team's review; they do not replace it, and every hiring decision is made by a person.

Connections at Babylist.If you have a family member or close personal relationship with a current Babylist employee, please let your recruiter know. This helps us keep our process fair and transparent for everyone.

Protect Yourself from Scams.All official outreach comes from the Babylist Talent Team via @babylist.com email addresses only. We will never ask for payment or personal financial information. If you receive outreach via WhatsApp, Telegram, or a non-Babylist email, it's not us. Verify open roles at babylist.com/careers.