Founding Technical Recruiter

Astrocade•Palo Alto, CA

9d•$150,000 - $200,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Astrocade is an AI technology company building super-intelligence for the interactive world, delivered through a breakout consumer platform. Today's frontier models can write, reason, and generate video. None can build a world you can step into and act on. Interactive world models, systems that generate playable experiences, are one of the defining problems on the path to ASI, and the foundation of the next great consumer platform. Interactivity is the holy grail of content: not something you watch, but something that responds to you. Cracking it will redefine how the world plays, learns, and connects. We're further ahead than anyone: the only team building the intelligence and the platform together, and both are already live. Our social UGC platform lets anyone create and play interactive experiences through natural language. And it's one of the fastest-growing consumer products in the world, with over 30 million users in just months since launch. Creators bring to life games, companions that remember and grow with them, learning experiences that adapt like a great tutor, and social worlds built with friends. The platform also powers our research with data no video dataset contains: millions of creators prompting and refining gives us paired data of human intent and the worlds that fulfill it, and every play session produces ground-truth, action-labeled interaction data at scale. All of it flows back into our models, and research ships to real players in days, spinning a flywheel no one else can build. We are a small team from Google Research, Meta, FAIR, Character.ai, and Stanford, led alongside Chief Scientist Fei-Fei Li, with frontier-scale compute and direct ownership of core model problems. We are backed by Sequoia Capital alongside Google, NVIDIA, LG, SEA Gaming, Dentsu Ventures, and Conviction, and by luminaries including Eric Schmidt and Jerry Yang. The next foundational AI company will be built where world models meet a billion players. We're the rare place where frontier research and a breakout consumer platform are one company, and where your work ships to millions, not to a paper. Come build it with us. About the Role We’re looking for our Founding Technical Recruiter to help build one of the strongest engineering teams in AI. You’ll partner directly with founders and engineering leaders to hire exceptional engineers across infrastructure, AI/ML, recommendation systems, data, and platform engineering. This is a full-cycle recruiting role, but sourcing is the heart of the job. You’ll spend your time identifying talent others miss, building relationships with world-class engineers, and helping us win competitive searches. Beyond recruiting, you’ll become an expert on the AI talent landscape—mapping companies, researching technical organizations, and developing the market intelligence that shapes our hiring strategy.

Requirements

Have 3–10 years of experience recruiting technical talent
Have experience sourcing and closing senior software engineers at startups or leading technology companies
Can confidently evaluate technical backgrounds across infrastructure, distributed systems, AI/ML, recommendation systems, backend, and platform engineering
Love outbound recruiting and proactively building relationships with exceptional talent
Are highly competitive, move with urgency, and enjoy solving difficult hiring problems
Are an exceptional communicator who earns trust with both candidates and hiring managers
Take ownership and thrive in a high-expectation, early-stage environment

Nice To Haves

Experience recruiting for AI, ML, recommendation systems, or infrastructure engineering teams
Experience building market maps, competitive intelligence, and talent research from scratch
Strong understanding of modern AI tools and how they can improve recruiting workflows
Experience hiring engineers from companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, xAI, Roblox, TikTok, or other leading AI and consumer technology companies

Responsibilities

Own full-cycle recruiting for technical roles from sourcing through offer close
Build outbound pipelines for exceptional engineering talent
Partner closely with founders and hiring managers on hiring strategy
Research companies, technical teams, and talent markets to identify high-impact candidates
Build competitive talent maps and hiring intelligence to inform recruiting strategy
Deliver an exceptional candidate experience throughout the hiring process
Continuously improve recruiting workflows using AI and automation where it creates leverage

Benefits

Competitive salary, meaningful equity, and performance bonus.
100% employer-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and eligible dependents.
Flexible PTO and unlimited sick time.
$650/month AI Tools budget to use on the tools that help you do your best work.
$500/month Lifestyle Benefit for wellness, fitness, meals, house cleaning, and more.
$200/month Fun Benefit to spend on hobbies, travel, games, concerts, or whatever brings you joy.
Up to 16 weeks paid parental leave for birth parents and 12 weeks for non-birth parents, plus a $1,500/month childcare benefit.
$2,000 workspace setup allowance and $200/month commuter benefit.
Daily breakfast, lunch, and dinner on in-office days, plus regular team events and offsites.
401(k) retirement plan through Human Interest.