Head of Talent

About this role

HEAD OF TALENT

OVERVIEW

Physical Superintelligence is an exceptionally well-funded seed-stage startup with roots at Google, Meta, DeepMind, NVIDIA, Citadel, Harvard, MIT, Johns Hopkins, the Perimeter Institute, and the Institute for Advanced Study, building AI systems to discover new physics at scale.

Our mission is to discover and commercialize transformative physics breakthroughs at scale with artificial superintelligence, safely, verifiably, and for broad public benefit.

Everything we build depends on a small number of exceptional hires. Our Member of Technical Staff roles — the researchers and engineers who build the discovery platform and run campaigns on it — are the most consequential hires we make. Alongside them, we are bringing on the leadership team that will define how this company operates as it scales: senior technical leaders, and functional leadership across commercial, operations, and research.

You will own that hiring. This is the first dedicated recruiting hire at the company, which means you are building the function as well as running it: the sourcing engine, the interview process, the bar, and the infrastructure underneath all of it.

ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITIES

Own hiring across the company. You will run searches end to end — sourcing, first conversations, loop design, candidate management, offer, and close — across our Member of Technical Staff roles and our leadership hires. You are accountable for the full path rather than a stage of it, and for the quality of what comes out the other side.

Run leadership and executive search in-house. Senior hires require a different motion than technical IC hiring: longer cycles, smaller candidate universes, confidential outreach, careful calibration with the founders, and a close process that accounts for what a senior person is actually weighing. You will run these searches directly, including the ones we would otherwise take to a retained firm.

Build the outbound engine. We want a system rather than a set of campaigns: a researched map of where these candidates are — labs, research groups, publications, repositories, conferences, and companies in transition — segmentation that reflects how our pitch differs for a physicist, an infrastructure engineer, and a commercial leader, outreach written by someone who understood the candidate's work first, and instrumentation that tells us reply rates, conversion, and where the funnel loses people. Precision matters considerably more than volume here, and we will want to see that reflected in how you measure it.

Bring your network to bear from day one. A meaningful share of the value in this role is the pipeline you already have. We expect you to arrive with standing relationships across the research and AI engineering communities, and with senior operators who will take your call, and to convert that into candidates in the first quarter rather than the third.

Represent the company credibly. You will be the first substantive interaction most candidates have with us. That requires enough technical fluency to discuss a candidate's work specifically — not to derive their results, but to have read the paper and know what is interesting about it — and enough understanding of the mission to speak to it without a script. Our team needs to trust your screen, and candidates need to leave the first conversation more interested than they arrived.

Close. We compete with frontier labs and established companies for the same people, and liquid compensation is not always where we win. What we offer is an unusual mission, meaningful early-stage equity, an engineering-led environment where people own problems end to end, and work with a genuine shot at mattering. You will need to make that case accurately, understand what a specific candidate is optimizing for, and structure a close around it.

Build the function. Applicant tracking system selection and hygiene, interview loop and scorecard design, hiring manager calibration, funnel reporting that reflects reality, and the compliance layer that comes with an export-controlled environment. You will be establishing these standards rather than inheriting them.

Hold the bar. There will be periods when we are behind on headcount and the case for flexibility sounds reasonable. At this stage, a weak hire in a senior or technical seat costs more than an open one. We expect you to make that argument, with evidence, to people senior to you.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Five or more years of recruiting experience, with placements at this level. Substantive experience finding and closing difficult hires, in-house or at a firm with a comparable standard.

A track record with our candidate population and leadership managing a team. You have placed Member of Technical Staff, research engineer, or research scientist candidates at frontier labs, comparable AI companies, or deep tech companies hiring at the same bar. Leadership and executive search experience alongside it is a significant advantage.

An established network. You bring relationships, not a target list. You know who is respected in these communities and who is merely visible, and the people you would want to reach will respond to you because of who is asking.

You source personally. You build lists, find non-obvious paths to candidates, and write your own outreach rather than delegating it and reviewing what returns.

Demonstrated outbound rigor. You can walk us through sequences you have written, the reply and conversion rates they produced, how you improved them, and what did not work.

Technical fluency. A working understanding of what our team does and why it is difficult, sufficient to have a specific conversation about a candidate's research or engineering work.

Comfort building without existing infrastructure. No established employer brand, no recruiting operations team, and a company most candidates have not yet heard of. Experience recruiting where the company name did much of the

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