Founding Recruiter

About this role

ABOUT BESPOKE LABS

Bespoke Labs is an applied AI research lab pioneering data and RL environment curation for training and evaluating agents. Recently, we curated OpenThoughts https://open-thoughts.ai/ and OpenThoughts-Agent https://www.open-thoughts.ai/blog/openthoughts-agent, we have been part of Terminal Bench https://www.tbench.ai/ and Terminal Bench Science https://www.tbench.ai/news/terminal-bench-science-0-1. We taught https://www.bespokelabs.ai/blog/improving-multi-turn-tool-use-with-reinforcement-learning agents to do multi-turn tool-calling with reinforcement learning, and are actively curating some of the best RL environments for SDLC and RSI.

Bespoke is uniquely positioned to capture a large market share of data and RL environment curation.

ABOUT THE ROLE

You're our first full-time recruiter, and you're going to build the thing that lets us grow: the engine that hires the RL-environments talent we run on. Do it well and talent stops being the reason we can't move faster.

You'll close hires yourself and build the machine behind them, the pipeline, the interview process, the rhythm with hiring managers. Technical recruiting is yours, end to end.

Here's what we care about most: have you done this before? If you've sourced and closed exceptional engineers in a market that fights you for them, and built the process that made it repeatable, let's talk.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Hire 10-15 technical people in year one, mostly RL-environments Engineers, Strategic Project Leads (SPLs), and Research Engineers, every one at our bar.

- Keep median time-to-fill on priority RL-env engineering roles near 30 days, posting open to offer accepted, because you're always running a warm pipeline instead of starting cold.

- Land a 75%+ offer-accept rate, including the head-to-head fights against Scale AI, Surge AI, Mercor, and the frontier labs.

- Improve ATS pipeline conversions, scorecard-based interviews, a sourcing playbook, and a real intake-and-debrief cadence with hiring managers.

- Bring in people who perform and stay, and put Bespoke on the map in the RL-env and data-curation talent world through inbound and referrals.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

- 3+ years of technical recruiting experience, ideally at a startup or in AI/ML

- Strong sourcing skills and a network in the AI/engineering talent market that is always-on and warm, and you know where RL-env talent actually is.

- Ability to move fast, operate independently, wear multiple hats, sell a hard mission, and win candidates who have other offers on the table.

- Familiarity with AI/ML roles and terminology, specially on RL environments, agentic tasks, and ML/infra work, and tell a strong engineer from one who just sounds like one.

- Ability to run on data to improve time-to-fill, accept rate, funnel conversion, source of hire.

WHAT WE OFFER

- Location: Mountain View, CA (Onsite)

- Base Salary: $150,000 – $225,000 USD / year

- Additional Comp: 25% performance-based bonus + equity

Benefits & Perks

- Health, dental, and vision coverage

- 401(k)

- Daily onsite lunch provided

- Visa sponsorship and relocation support available

- Direct impact on how the industry trains and evaluates agents

We encourage you to apply even if you don't meet every qualification. We value diverse perspectives and are happy to discuss how your unique background could be a great fit for this role.

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