Senior Recruiter

Merge; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 80,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Merge in San Francisco is seeking a Senior Recruiter passionate about bridging biological and artificial intelligence. You will own the full-cycle recruiting for impactful research and scientific roles, collaborating closely with hiring managers to define criteria and evaluate candidates.

The ideal candidate thrives in ambiguity and has a strong track record in sourcing and hiring for specialized technical teams. If you're excited to shape the hiring process in an innovative lab, apply today!

Qualifications

• Experience with end-to-end recruiting for technical or scientific roles.
• Track record of sourcing passive candidates in competitive markets.
• Strong process discipline with clean pipelines and structured notes.

Responsibilities

• Own full-cycle recruiting for research and scientific roles.
• Partner with hiring managers to define role scope and criteria.
• Create targeted sourcing strategies for passive candidates.

Skills

Candidate communication

Technical sourcing

Hiring manager partnership

Job description

Merge Labs is a frontier research lab with the mission of bridging biological and artificial intelligence to maximize human ability, agency and experience. We’re pursuing this goal by developing fundamentally new approaches to brain-computer interfaces that interact with the brain at high bandwidth, integrate with advanced AI, and are ultimately safe and accessible for anyone to use.

About the team

The talent team at Merge is small, focused, and deeply embedded with the company’s research and technical leadership. We are building the early recruiting foundation for a frontier interdisciplinary lab, where every hire can shape the trajectory of the company. Our hiring spans bioengineering, neuroscience, machine learning, engineering, and adjacent scientific and technical disciplines that contribute to building brain-computer interfaces that bridge biological and artificial intelligence.

About the role

We are hiring a Senior Recruiter to own research and scientific recruiting across some of Merge’s most impactful roles. This is a full-cycle recruiting role for someone who enjoys hard searches, ambiguous technical domains, passive candidate sourcing, and close partnership with research leaders. You will help translate frontier research needs into hiring strategies, build talent maps across academia and industry, engage exceptional candidates, and create a rigorous, high-trust candidate experience.

This role is ideal for a recruiter who has hired for specialized technical or scientific teams and wants to operate close to the research frontier. You do not need to be a neuroscientist or ML researcher, but you should be intellectually curious, rigorous, and comfortable learning enough of a domain to recruit credibly.

In this role, you will:

• Own full-cycle recruiting for research and scientific roles across bioengineering, neuro, ML, engineering, and adjacent technical areas.
• Partner with hiring managers to define role scope, must-have criteria, interview plans, and candidate evaluation rubrics.
• Build targeted sourcing strategies for passive candidates across companies, labs, universities, publications, conferences, and research networks.
• Create and maintain talent maps for priority domains, including candidate archetypes, companies/labs of interest, and outreach narratives.
• Screen candidates for motivation, trajectory, technical relevance, communication, and fit with Merge’s stage and mission.
• Drive a structured and high-signal hiring process, including interview coordination, feedback loops, scorecard quality, and closing strategy.
• Represent Merge’s mission with depth, clarity, and honesty to candidates considering academia, large labs, startups, or other frontier opportunities.
• Use data to diagnose bottlenecks, improve hiring manager alignment, and increase search quality and velocity.
• Help build the recruiting infrastructure of an early talent function: templates, process, reporting, candidate experience norms, and operating cadence.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• Experience owning multiple challenging pipelines end-to-end, including meaningful ownership of technical, scientific, research, or highly specialized roles.
• A track record of sourcing and closing passive candidates in competitive talent markets.
• Strong hiring manager partnership: you can clarify ambiguous needs, push for prioritization, and keep teams aligned.
• Deep expertise in at least one relevant scientific or technical domain and comfort learning unfamiliar technical domains and translating them into search strategy.
• Excellent candidate communication, especially with senior, skeptical, and highly sought-after candidates.
• Strong process discipline: clean pipelines, clear follow-up, structured notes, and data-informed prioritization.
• High integrity and sound judgment when representing candidates, compensation, timelines, and company stage.
• Excitement about building recruiting systems in a small, high-ownership team.

If you’re excited about this role but don’t meet every qualification, please apply. As we build, we’re hiring for complementary strengths to form a high-impact team.

For more information about hiring at Merge, please visit our Hiring FAQ.

Merge Labs does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, family status, ancestry, citizenship, U.S. military (state and federal) and veteran status, or any other legally protected status. It is our intention that all applicants be given equal opportunity and that selection decisions are based on job related factors. We are an equal opportunity employer.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made by emailing [e-mail].