Talent Associate

Taste Labs; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Taste Labs is building the data and infrastructure layer for taste, and we are looking for a Sourcer to find exceptional people and coordinate them through our process end to end. You’ll work directly with our Talent & People Operations Lead to locate engineers, researchers, designers and operators who aren’t actively looking, ensuring candidates move quickly and feel cared for.

Part sourcer, part coordinator, you will obsess over the details and the candidate experience, building playbooks and

Qualifications

• 2+ years recruiting or sourcing experience, ideally at a startup.
• Ability to move fast, with strong follow-up and attention to detail.
• Comfort with ambiguity and a proactive mindset in candidate outreach.

Responsibilities

• Find great engineers, researchers, designers and operators not actively looking.
• Build target lists and outreach that candidates reply to.
• Review inbound and agency candidates on a tight cadence.
• Schedule interviews and onsites, accelerating time-to-hire.
• Maintain a clean, current candidate pipeline in Ashby.
• Create memorable candidate experiences, even when saying no.
• Turn successful approaches into playbooks and automations.

Skills

Sourcing experience

Recruiting coordination

Startup DNA

Attention to detail

Strong communicator

AI tooling

Tools

Ashby

LinkedIn Recruiter

Juicebox (sourcing tools)

Job description

About the company

Taste Labs is building the data and infrastructure layer for taste.

Our goal is to end AI slop. To make AI feel right, not just be correct. We raised $18.5M in seed co-led by Amplify and CRV, and most frontier labs are already customers.

AI has nailed objective domains and can generate anything. The hard part left is judgement: what fits, what feels like you, what's actually GREAT. We're turning that into something measurable, starting with design.

We do it on two sides: building the post-training data and RL environments that teach taste to frontier models, and the context and verification tools agents need to produce work that's more creative, more on-brand, more right.

If that problem excites you, you'll like it here!

About the role

Every hire counts right now. We're a small team building something hard, and who we bring in shapes everything.

You'll source exceptional people and coordinate them through our process, end to end. Working directly with our Talent & People Operations Lead, you'll find engineers, researchers, designers and operators who aren't looking, and make sure every candidate moves fast and feels taken care of.

Part sourcer, part coordinator. All about the details.

Types of problems you'd work on

• Find great engineers, researchers, designers and operators who aren't actively looking
• Build target lists and outreach that great candidates actually reply to
• Review inbound and agency candidates on a tight cadence so no one sits
• Schedule interviews and onsites, and compress the time between rounds
• Keep our pipeline clean, current and moving in Ashby
• Make our candidate experience something people talk about, even when it's a no
• Turn what works into playbooks and automations

What matters to us

• Recruiting experience: 2+ years in sourcing, recruiting coordination or a similar role, ideally at a startup
• High urgency: you move fast, follow up faster, and hate seeing candidates wait
• Detail-oriented: nothing falls through the cracks, and you notice what others miss
• Startup DNA: you're comfortable with ambiguity, no such thing as 'not in scope'. You'll be given a lot of room to run
• Great communicator: candidates, hiring managers and founders trust you to keep things moving
• AI forward: you use AI tools to source, automate the repetitive work and operate faster

Bonus points

• You've recruited technical or design talent at an early-stage company
• Experience with Ashby, LinkedIn Recruiter or sourcing tools like Juicebox
• You're genuinely into AI, design or creative work