Founding Technical Recruiter

About the Client

We build the vendor-neutral operating system for agentic AI in high-consequence environments. In our first ten months we won four fully competed prime contracts across the U.S. Government, every one of them deploying into classified spaces. We are live on JWICS. We were selected from a field of 200+ companies for a defense innovation challenge and won it. We beat two established defense primes on the same program and earned the follow-on, now in execution.

We are hiring across engineering, GTM, product, design, operations, and security. Most of what we need is technical, and much of it is cleared.

You are the first recruiter in the building. You are not inheriting a sourcing engine, a warm pipeline, or proven outbound messaging. You are building them, with the founding team beside you rather than above you. Leadership runs executive search and owns the interview loops. You own everything that fills them, from first touch to signed offer.

If you have spent a few years in a full-desk seat closing hard roles and you are looking for the job where you build the function instead of working someone else's, this is that job.

You hire the people who beat the primes.

This role is not for: Someone who needs a defined playbook. Someone who works inbound and waits for the pipeline to fill itself. Someone who wants to manage a recruiting team on day one, because there isn't one yet.

• Full-cycle recruiting across every function and level: sourcing, screening, scheduling, candidate management, and driving offers to close. Some weeks are engineering deep-dives, some weeks are operations and security searches. You move between them without losing momentum.
• The cleared pipeline for TS/SCI and polygraph roles. This candidate pool does not behave like commercial tech. The people we want are not browsing job boards and they do not respond to standard outreach. Working out how to reach them repeatably is the hardest part of this job and the part that will define your first year. You will not do it alone.
• Outbound sourcing as the default, not the fallback. Linked In Recruiter, referrals, community and event channels, and whatever else works. Inbound applicants will not fill these roles.
• Technical credibility in candidate conversations. You read a Forward Deployed Engineer or Applied AI Engineer JD and understand what separates a real fit from a keyword match. You can hold a substantive first call with an engineer without handing them off.
• Offer construction and closing. Compensation conversations, equity explanation, competing offers, and the follow‑through that gets a signature. You close your own candidates.
• Ashby ownership
  : pipeline hygiene, accurate stages, scheduling, and the weekly numbers leadership uses to decide where to push.
• Employer brand and candidate‑facing presence, in partnership with marketing and the founding team. Job posts, outbound messaging, referral campaigns, conference presence, and the content that makes cleared operators notice us.
• Referral activation across a team of CIA officers, Special Operations veterans, and frontier‑lab engineers. Their networks are the best source of cleared talent we have and most of it is untapped.
• Calling out what’s broken. You will see process failures before anyone else does. You are expected to say so, not route around them.

• 3+ years of full‑cycle or full‑desk recruiting
  , with meaningful technical hiring in it. Agency time counts.
• Track record sourcing passive candidates and building pipeline from nothing, not just working inbound or agency‑fed reqs
• Demonstrated ability to close candidates personally
  , including navigating competing offers
• Comfort engaging substantively with engineers about what…