Talent Engineer

People Culture Talent; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

People Culture Talent is seeking a Talent Engineer, a senior IC who owns the entire recruiting cycle and client relationship from strategy to close. You design hiring plans, write compelling descriptions, and guide stakeholders with strong judgment.

You’ll leverage AI tools to build innovative sourcing lists, run fast, and work remotely with 4–5 hours overlap on PT business hours for collaboration with clients and teams.

Qualifications

• Experience leading full-cycle technical searches.
• Ability to design hiring plans and job descriptions.
• Comfortable with CTO/VP-level conversations.
• Proficient in AI-assisted sourcing and analysis.
• Independent, self-directed with strong judgment.

Responsibilities

• Own client partnership and strategy end-to-end.
• Execute searches and manage candidate workflow.
• Build optimized sourcing workflows and tooling.
• Apply data-driven judgment to evaluate candidates.

Skills

Full-cycle recruiting

Client partnership

AI tooling

Job description writing

Sourcing strategy

Judgment

Communication

Autonomy

Job description

The Role

We're looking for a Talent Engineer - a senior, principal level individual contributor who owns the entire recruiting cycle and client relationship: strategy, execution, and everything in between.

You're not a sourcer who occasionally gets client-facing, and you're not a recruiter who hands off the hard problems. You're the person a founder trusts to design the hiring plan, write the job description that attracts the right person, provides strong judgement and education to run a real process, and then go find and close the right candidates.

This role exists for someone who thinks like an operator. You're equally comfortable in a strategy conversation with a CTO but also building innovative sourcing lists late at night because you've uncovered a unique angle. You build and use AI tools, not as a novelty but as leverage, so you can move faster and smarter than recruiters running a manual process.

Note: This role is fully remote, but will require on average 4-5 hours of overlap a day within the 9-6pm PT timezone due to client, team, and candidate overlap.

What You’ll Own

• Client Partnership & Strategy

• Search Execution

• Building & Optimization

• Data & Judgment

What You’ll Bring

• Track Record: You have independently managed full-cycle technical searches and quickly earned the trust of a CTO or VP of Engineering within your first few conversations. You take ownership of outcomes, not just activities.

• Range: You are comfortable handling all aspects of the job-sourcing, screening, client strategy, job description writing, and interview design - you see these as interconnected rather than separate roles.

• Builder's Mindset: You have built or significantly improved a workflow, tool, or process, and you find real satisfaction in automating what was once manual work.

• AI Fluency: You use Claude or comparable tools daily as working partners for research, drafting, and analysis, and you are genuinely excited by the potential of agentic and API-driven tools in recruiting-not just aware they exist.

• Creative Problem Solving: When common sourcing channels or messaging approaches don't work, you don't wait for direction-you proactively test alternative solutions.

• Judgment: You can clearly articulate what distinguishes a strong candidate from an exceptional one, and you trust your judgment enough to confidently push back on clients when necessary.

• Communication: You are able to write a job description, brief a founder, coach a hiring manager, and craft outreach that gets responses-communicating clearly and independently at every step.

• Autonomy: You manage your own schedule, handle multiple client relationships and searches at once, and make sound decisions without waiting for approval.

This Role Probably Isn’t for You If

• You want to focus solely on either sourcing or client strategy—this role requires both, always.

• You require a fixed playbook and structure to feel confident.

• Your experience with AI tools is limited to ChatGPT, or you haven't built anything truly useful with AI.

• You require significant ramp-up time before operating independently with senior stakeholders.

• You're seeking a people management track right now, rather than delving deeply as an IC.

• You approach things with a fixed playbook and aren't excited to think from first principles.

Contract Terms

This is a contract-to-hire position with strong potential for permanent conversion based on performance and business needs. PCT believes in growing with talented people who are committed to building exceptional teams. Competitive compensation provided with placement-based bonuses.