Want to know if this job is worth applying to?
San Francisco, California, United States
Hybrid
Available
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.
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.
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
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
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
$250-300k+ cash compensation + meaningful equity
Flexible work environment
Visa sponsorship and relocation support
Professional development budget
Team off-sites and conference attendance
