Subquadratic is a frontier AI research company that believes the architecture layer is the highest-leverage surface in AI. While other major labs focus on incremental improvements to Transformer models, we're pushing foundational change at the architecture level to build models and products that scale efficiently.

About the role

The researchers we want are rarely looking. They're publishing, shipping and fielding offers from the largest labs. Reaching them takes more than a job post. It takes knowing the field, finding the right people early, and staying in touch long before the timing is right.

You'll own hiring for research and engineering roles end to end, from mapping who's out there to closing offers. You're a systems thinker: you know great hires come from targeted, consistent outreach and disciplined follow-up, not luck. You'll cast a wide net, then go deep on the people who matter most.

This is an early, high-ownership role, and you'll help build how SubQ recruits as we grow. You'll work directly with our Head of People and Talent to shape our recruiting and talent function.

What you'll do

Map the field. Build and maintain a living map of research talent across labs, universities, open-source projects and conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, MLSys). Know who wrote the papers and shipped the code that matter to our work.
Source and engage passive candidates. Write personal, technically informed outreach to senior researchers and engineers in pre-training, post-training and inference. Follow up consistently, and keep relationships warm over months, not days.
Run the full cycle. Partner with hiring managers on what great looks like for each role, manage candidates through our interview loop, and keep the process fast and organized.
Close. Understand what each candidate cares about, and close people who are weighing offers from the top AI labs.
Make every candidate's experience excellent. Whether or not we hire someone, they should leave thinking well of SubQ. The research community is small.
Build the system. Track pipeline metrics, learn what works, and improve our tools and processes in Ashby. Manage our agency partners so their work adds to yours instead of overlapping with it.
Recruit with AI. Use AI tools to build sourcing workflows that scale: automated searches across papers, conference proceedings, GitHub and Google Scholar; scrapers and enrichment that turn talent maps into prioritized lists; and personalized outreach at volume without losing the personal touch.
Rediscover our existing pipeline. We've already surfaced many strong candidates through our own sourcing and our agency partners. Build systems to search, tag and resurface past applicants and near-misses in Ashby when the right role or timing comes along.
Grow the pipeline beyond outreach. Help run research events, university relationships and conference presence, with a priority on bringing more women researchers into our pipeline.

What you bring

Must-have

4+ years of technical recruiting or sourcing, with recent experience hiring for an AI lab, an AI research team, or a technical startup
A track record of finding and engaging passive technical candidates, including researchers and senior engineers, and getting them to say yes
Enough technical fluency to read a Google Scholar profile, a paper abstract or a GitHub repo, and tell whether someone's work fits a role
Strong, personal writing. Your outreach gets replies because it shows you understand the person's work.
Experience closing candidates against competing offers from top companies
Systems thinking: you build repeatable processes, track what matters, and improve them over time
Hands-on fluency with AI tools (such as Claude or ChatGPT) for sourcing and recruiting work: building search strings and scrapers, enriching and ranking candidate lists, drafting outreach, and automating repetitive steps
Comfort with ambiguity and shifting priorities at an early-stage company

Nice-to-have

Knowledge of the ML research landscape: key labs, research groups, conferences and communities
Experience with sourcing tools such as LinkedIn Recruiter, Gem, Juicebox, or academic search tools
Experience recruiting from universities and PhD programs
Experience building diverse research pipelines
Familiarity with visa and immigration processes for international candidates

Location and benefits

Location: San Francisco (Financial District), hybrid
Compensation: $180,000–$240,000 base salary, plus equity
Health: SubQ covers 100% of medical, dental and vision premiums for employees and their dependents
401(k): starting January 2027

Compensation Range: $180K - $240K

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