Lead Technical Recruiter

About Elicit

Elicit is an AI research assistant that uses language models to help researchers figure out what’s true and make better decisions. Our mission is to radically increase good reasoning. Elicit helps expert researchers push the frontier of what's possible in fields like biomedicine, health economics, and computer science.

Visit our Twitter to learn more about how Elicit is helping researchers and making progress on our mission.

Why we’re hiring for this role

Our plans are ambitious. We've raised a $22M Series A round in order to expand beyond academic research. We'll apply the transparency and systematicity we applied to automate literature reviews and broadly become the gold standard for evidence-based AI-native decision-making across many industries.

To enable this, we're bringing in talent that demonstrates excellence and mastery across the team. We’re seeking a deeply hands-on technical recruiter to help us compete for the best engineering and research talent in the world. This is a high-impact role focused on full-cycle recruiting for frontier AI talent. You’ll help Elicit go head-to-head with companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to build a world-class team.

What you'll do

End-to-end recruiting

• This is a hands-on role! You'll personally manage full cycle recruiting across the team, ensuring pipelines are healthy and we're making timely hires. To get a sense of volume, we expect to have at least 2-3 successful hires every quarter.

• Source and nurture top candidates using a wide variety of channels, ranging from the expected (direct email, industry networks, online communities) to the innovative (throwing events, in-person visits, you tell us what's working well within the technical niches we're tapping into!).

• Conduct intro calls and initial screening interviews to ensure we're setting candidates and interviewers up for a successful, mutually beneficial process.

• Act as a strategic partner to our technical leaders, shaping job descriptions, interview processes, and closing strategy for critical roles.

• Keep Ashby up to date and develop a cadence for sharing pipeline reports with hiring managers and leadership.

Refine our technical hiring strategy

• Continuously evolve our sourcing tactics, interview loops, and decision-making frameworks to stay competitive in the market for elite technical talent.

• Advise on technical compensation trends and top-of-market candidate expectations.

• Surface and connect with top-tier talent, building tailored strategies to bring leading researchers and engineers to Elicit.

Keep Elicit’s bar for quality high

• You'll keep it real with our hiring managers and leadership team and advise on market realities for critical roles. You'll be the voice of our candidates, ensuring we're presenting the most compelling reasons for the best-fit talent to join Elicit.

• Protect the candidate experience! Help us stay accountable to our values and commitment to operating a consistent, welcoming, and high-quality evaluation process from start to finish.

What you bring to the role

• Proven success recruiting for deeply technical and specialized roles in AI, machine learning, or adjacent fields.

• Comfort sourcing and closing top technical talent in highly competitive markets (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, FAANG).

• Several years of experience in talent acquisition and recruiting, particularly in a startup environment, with many success stories to share about creatively sourcing and placing people into their dream roles. You've been a key early TA hire in a company, and have scaled startup teams through different growth stages.

• A strong fluency and connection with Elicit's mission that helps you connect with passive candidates, and turn them into enthusiastic candidates who want to drop everything to build with us.

• Experience setting up effective metrics dashboards and reports to share with hiring managers and guide your focus.

• Operational excellence, with high attention to detail and care for the candidate experience.

• A sense of joy in what you do! One thing we love about our team at Elicit is that everybody’s a craftsperson who cares deeply about their field. For this role, we are looking for who truly loves and wants to stay in TA long term.

Note: we're flexible with work location, but we do ask that candidates for this role are able to travel to Oakland at least twice a quarter.

Where you'll get to grow in your role

• Help define what world-class recruiting looks like in a frontier AI startup—and how we can win in a talent market that’s only getting more competitive.

• In partnership with company leadership and the Head of Ops, you'll help isolate and communicate Elicit's key EVPs and leverage our unique team and culture to help overcome hiring challenges. You'll support innovating on our employer branding strategies and campaigns to establish Elicit as an employer of choice.

• Help build, lead, and mentor a small but mighty recruiting team that is hyper-focused on the sourcing strategies and market nuances our best-fit talent cares about most.

• Taking your experience with competency-focused, structured interviewing, you'll help the Elicit team of interviewers drive for better, more effective assessment results.

• Work with the Head of Ops and other department leads to leverage learnings from the assessment process to set new employees up for a successful onboarding and tenure with Elicit. We want the entire employee lifecycle journey to be consistent, engaging, and supportive all the way through.

• Work with the Ops team to create and nurture our talent community with events, meet-ups, resources, and other strategies to expand and enhance our talent pipelines.

Compensation, benefits, and perks

In addition to working on important problems as part of a productive and positive team, we also offer great benefits (with some variation based on location):

• Flexible work environment: work from our office in Oakland or remotely within the US, with the expectation of travel twice a quarter.

• Fully covered health, dental, vision, and life insurance for you, generous coverage for the rest of your family (FSA/HSA, too)

• Flexible vacation policy, with a minimum recommendation of 20 days / year and plenty of company holidays

• 401K with a 6% employer match

• $2,000 device budget to start, with more accumulating for each month of work

• $500 / year personal development budget

• A team administrative assistant who can help you with personal and work tasks

• You can find more reasons to work with us in this thread!

For all roles at Elicit, we use a data-backed compensation framework to keep salaries market-competitive, equitable, and simple to understand.

• This role is scoped as a senior IC and the expected budget for is between $170-210K + competitive equity.