Head of Talent

Plato • San Francisco, CA

8d • $180,000 - $280,000 • Onsite

About The Position

Plato is an applied research lab focused on creating environments for training specialized AI agents. They achieve this by transforming proprietary real-world data into high-fidelity simulations that generate the dense reinforcement learning signal necessary for training frontier models. The company believes that while compute and baseline architectures are becoming commoditized, environment design and RL data remain critical bottlenecks. Plato aims to make RL signal provable, grounded, and robust at scale, addressing issues where models fail due to poor task design, leaky reward functions, or brittle verifiers that encourage cheating over learning. Based in San Francisco, Plato is supported by prominent investors and researchers from leading frontier labs.

Requirements

• 5+ years in recruiting with meaningful in-house experience at a high-growth startup, owning searches end to end.
• Experience building a candidate pipeline and a hiring process from scratch.
• Ability to hold a substantive conversation with research and infrastructure engineers about their work and evaluate technical resumes.
• Comfortable saying no when a hiring manager is desperate to fill a seat, and able to explain the decision based on signal rather than feel.
• A track record of closing senior candidates against competing offers from strong companies.

Nice To Haves

• Experience hiring research, ML, or infrastructure talent at an AI lab or deep-tech company.
• Experience scaling a team from roughly ten people to fifty, including the process changes required for that transition.
• Hands-on ownership of a modern recruiting stack (Ashby, Paraform, or similar) and comfort working from pipeline data.
• Experience partnering with founders on org design and headcount planning, not just requisition execution.

Responsibilities

• Own hiring end to end across every function, partnering with hiring managers on role definition, headcount planning, and prioritization, and owning the outcome for each search.
• Translate Plato's mission and operating principles into concrete, testable signals (competencies, scorecards, and calibration) to define a specific and defensible hiring bar.
• Own the top of the funnel end to end, building durable inbound and outbound pipelines, running outbound sourcing motions and referral programs, cultivating agency and community partnerships, and maintaining a warm bench of qualified candidates.
• Architect interview loops for each function, including structured stages, work samples, debriefs, and decision rules, and train interviewers to maintain consistency as the team grows.
• Run Ashby as the system of record, instrumenting the pipeline, reporting on conversion, time-to-hire, source quality, and offer-accept rates, and using data to identify and fix issues.
• Own the candidate experience end to end and personally drive offers and closes against competing frontier-lab offers.
• Start as a hands-on individual contributor and grow the talent function by adding coordinators, sourcers, and recruiters as volume demands.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed