Senior Technical Sourcer

Plaid•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

We are hiring a Senior Technical Sourcer to build the pipelines behind Plaid's most difficult technical searches. You will own the top of the funnel across software engineering, infrastructure, data science, AI/ML, and security, from market research and pipeline strategy to qualified candidates entering the interview process. This role is for a deep researcher. Many of the people we need are not always findable by title alone, do not respond to templated outreach, and are not on any list you can buy. You will find them anyway, by mapping the market, reading the work, and writing outreach that earns a reply from someone who ignores twenty recruiter messages a week. You will carry a high req load across multiple technical domains at once, and you will do it without losing the details that make a pipeline trustworthy. You will also turn what you learn into intelligence the team can use: where the talent actually sits, what competitors are building and paying for, and what a role needs to look like to be winnable. This is a high-visibility seat. The quality of what enters our funnel shapes every hiring decision downstream.

Requirements

6+ years of technical sourcing/recruiting experience, including in-house sourcing at a high-growth technology company.
Mastery of sourcing research technique and tooling: boolean and x-ray search, LinkedIn Recruiter, GitHub and technical communities, publications and conference sources, and CRM or ATS sourcing workflows. You can find people who are not searchable by just title or company name.
Demonstrated success in high-volume, high-urgency environments, carrying multiple technical searches at once without dropping the details.
Genuine fluency in technical skill sets. You can read a job spec, a GitHub profile, or a research paper and make a defensible call on relevance.
Proven track record sourcing for at least one hard-to-fill domain such as AI/ML, data science, data infrastructure, distributed systems, or security engineering. (Bonus if you’ve done it in a fintech space.)
Exceptional written and verbal communication skills. Your outreach is short, specific, and human, and senior engineers reply to it.
Data discipline. You use funnel metrics to decide where to spend effort, and you can explain your pipeline with numbers rather than anecdotes.
Meticulous attention to detail and personal ownership of your data hygiene. If your pipeline data is wrong, no one downstream can plan.
A candidate-first approach built on empathy, transparency, and consistent follow-through.

Nice To Haves

Experience sourcing in fintech, financial services, or another regulated environments.
Experience producing talent intelligence or market mapping work that was presented to senior leadership and changed a hiring decision.
Experience building sourcing playbooks, training other sourcers, or evaluating and rolling out sourcing tooling or process efficiency projects.
Experience sourcing for distributed or international teams.
Familiarity with inclusive sourcing practices and a track record of building diverse technical pipelines.

Responsibilities

Own top-of-funnel strategy and execution for technical reqs across engineering, infrastructure, data, AI/ML, and security. You build the pipeline, engage and qualify the candidate, and hand off a qualified, well-briefed person to the recruiter.
Run deep talent research. Market maps, org mapping, competitor teardowns, conference and publication mining, open-source and technical community research, and advanced boolean and x-ray search across sources most people do not think to check.
Find niche and emerging technical talent where the qualified pool is small and almost entirely passive, including AI/ML, applied research, distributed systems, and security engineering.
Write outreach that gets answered. You personalize based on what someone has actually built, you test your messaging, and you own your response rate as a number you can explain.
Operate at volume without losing precision. You run multiple searches at once with disciplined follow-up cadences, accurate ATS hygiene, and clean data that others can trust.
Turn research into intelligence. Build market maps, talent density views, and competitive hiring insights, then bring them to recruiters and hiring managers to shape role scope, leveling, and search strategy.
Build diverse pipelines by design, through the breadth of your research and the inclusivity of your outreach, not as a screening step at the end.
Partner closely with recruiters and hiring managers on calibration. You bring the market back into the room when a role as written is not findable, and you propose what would make it winnable.
Track and report your funnel. Response rate, screen pass rate, and stage conversion tell you where to spend your next hour. Use them, and share what they say.
Represent Plaid authentically. You are often a candidate's first impression of us, and that first conversation sets the tone for everything after it.