Head of Talent Engineering

Alpaca Health•New York City, NY

4d•Onsite

About The Position

Alpaca Health enables clinicians to become entrepreneurs, starting in autism care. We help clinicians launch and scale their own clinics by providing AI-powered software, payer contracting, and full back-office infrastructure. Our goal is simple: make it dramatically easier for exceptional clinicians to build independent practices. We've raised over $14M from investors including Core Innovation Capital, Adverb Ventures, and South Park Commons. Today we're serving hundreds of families and growing over 30% month over month. We're building a generational company, and that starts with building an exceptional team. This is a full-time role based in New York City. We work together in person five days per week. We believe recruiting is an engineering problem. The best companies don't simply hire great people. They build systems that consistently discover, attract, evaluate, and close exceptional talent before everyone else. As our Head of Talent Engineering, you'll build that system. You'll combine recruiting, automation, AI, software, content, operations, and storytelling to create one of the highest-performing talent engines in startups. You'll recruit incredible people yourself, but just as importantly, you'll design the machine that makes exceptional hiring inevitable. The people you hire and the systems you build will directly determine Alpaca's trajectory.

Requirements

Obsessed with exceptional talent: Believe that a handful of extraordinary people can change the trajectory of an entire company. Would rather leave a role open than lower the hiring bar.
Think in systems: Naturally look for leverage. Whenever you perform repetitive work, your instinct is to automate it. You enjoy building processes that become competitive advantages.
AI-native: Actively use AI throughout your workflow. Research. Sourcing. Outreach. Scheduling. Evaluation. Automation. Prompting. Agentic workflows. You aren't experimenting with AI. You already work differently because of it.
Both technical and people-oriented: Love software, but recruiting is ultimately about people. You can move seamlessly between building workflows and building relationships.
Entrepreneurial: Thrive in ambiguity. Nobody needs to tell you what to build next. You identify bottlenecks, design solutions, and execute quickly. Building from zero energizes you.
Exceptional closer: Great recruiting isn't convincing people. It's helping exceptional people make exceptional decisions. You build trust, understand motivations, navigate objections, and communicate opportunity with conviction.
High standards and high intensity: Building a generational company requires exceptional people. You're energized by ambitious goals, move with urgency, and care deeply about quality. You believe recruiting is one of the highest-leverage functions inside a startup.

Responsibilities

Build Alpaca's Talent Engine: Design the infrastructure that powers hiring across the company. This includes: AI-powered sourcing systems, Recruiting automations and workflows, Candidate research pipelines, Outreach engines, Interview infrastructure, Recruiting analytics, Talent CRM, Hiring dashboards, Internal recruiting tools. You'll constantly ask: "How can software replace manual recruiting work?"
Recruit Exceptional People: Own executive and critical hiring across engineering, product, GTM, operations, clinical leadership, and emerging functions. You'll partner directly with founders to define roles, build candidate pipelines, run interview processes, and close world-class talent. We care far more about talent density than hiring volume.
Build Proprietary Sourcing Advantages: Develop creative ways to identify talent before anyone else through: AI research, Outbound sourcing, Community building, Referral networks, Events, Content, University partnerships, Open-source contributions, Founder networks, Custom datasets. You enjoy solving the puzzle: "Where are the exceptional people nobody else is talking to?"
Engineer Recruiting Workflows: Design systems that continuously increase speed, quality, and leverage. Examples include: AI sourcing agents, Automated candidate enrichment, Personalized outreach generation, Scheduling automation, Candidate scoring, Interview calibration, Offer workflows, Recruiting dashboards, Knowledge management. You think like an operator and build like an engineer.
Raise the Hiring Bar: Partner closely with hiring managers to define excellence. Improve interview quality. Design better work samples. Challenge assumptions. Continuously improve how we evaluate talent. The goal isn't simply filling positions. It's building one of the strongest teams in healthcare.
Build Alpaca's Talent Brand: Help establish Alpaca as one of the most exciting places to build a career through: Founder content, Engineering content, Recruiting campaigns, Events, Community engagement, Candidate experience, Employer branding. Great recruiting is exceptional storytelling.
Build the Recruiting Organization: As Alpaca grows, you'll define how recruiting scales. You'll determine: Which roles to hire internally, Which work should be automated, Where specialized recruiters make sense, How AI changes recruiting, How to maintain hiring quality at scale.