Recruiter

**About the Role** ------------------ We're hiring our first in\-house recruiter to help us scale a small, talent\-dense team without diluting the bar. The bar is high: Vals is small enough that one wrong hire is felt by everyone, and one great hire reshapes a team. The ideal candidate likely has a nontraditional background for a recruiter — technical foundation, ideally CS or engineering, who moved into talent because they realized that finding and closing the right people is the highest\-leverage thing they can do at an early\-stage company. You'll partner directly with the founders and hiring managers to source, screen, and close engineers, researchers, and GTM hires. You'll own pipelines end\-to\-end: writing JDs that pull the right candidates, sourcing the top of the funnel yourself, running first\-round calls, managing candidates through technical loops, and helping us close offers against competitive packages from frontier labs. You're joining as the first dedicated talent hire at a company. Motivated people will own more of this function over time — building out the team, the playbook, and the bar — with a pathway to grow into Head of People as we scale. ### **Requirements** * 1\+ years of in\-house recruiting at a high\-growth startup, ideally in AI/ML, infra, or developer tools. * A track record of closing engineers or researchers against competitive offers, including offers from frontier AI labs. * Conversational familiarity with what's going on in AI. You should be able to sustain a conversation with technical talent and speak credibly about the labs, the work and where the field is heading. * Strong written communication. * Ability to work in\-person, in San Francisco. ### **Nice to haves** * A technical background (CS or engineering degree, prior SWE experience). * Prior experience hiring ML researchers or engineers with publications. * Experience setting up scrappy recruiting ops (sourcing tools, ATS selection, interview rubrics) from zero.