Sr. Recruiter, AI Research & Leadership

Redmond, WA ·
Talent Acquisition: Individual contributor 
Reports to: VP of Global Talent Acquisition
Work model: Hybrid, onsite 3 days per week

This role can be based in Redmond, WA or Palo Alto, CA.
 

About the role

The people you will be hiring already hear from frontier labs and the largest technology companies every week.
 

Centific is building a centralized talent acquisition function for the first time, and this is one of the first roles in it. You will own our hardest and most visible hires from first conversation to signed offer: researchers at every level, from early-career to distinguished, AI architects, and the leaders above them, across our Redmond and Palo Alto sites.
 

You will be the person who can tell an executive how many people actually match the profile they just described, how many of those would take a call, and what it would take to get one to say yes.

Sometimes the answer is that the person exists but is rarer, more expensive, or harder to move than the plan assumed, and something has to flex: the role design, the level, the money, or the story. We want to hear that, with the evidence behind it.
 

There is no playbook here yet, and you will help write it.

Who we are

The real world is complex, nuanced, and human. For AI to understand it, the data it learns from has to carry more than information: context, culture, judgment, and the harder-to-name sense of taste that tells a person what actually fits. That is what Centific builds. The data, the human feedback, the benchmarks and evaluation systems that let AI learn from the real world and be tested against it, across languages, domains, and modalities.
 

Our research organization is where that gets pushed forward. Sixteen papers in two years on video generation benchmarks, medical audio, multilingual safety, and reinforcement learning for clinical agents. A Physical AI Lab building world models, vision-language-action systems, and sim2real transfer.
 

The work

• Run researcher (all levels), AI architect, and leadership searches end to end, from intake through close.
• Size the market before outreach goes out: a defensible success profile, a realistic obtainable segment, and a named target map of companies, teams, and people.
• Own the offer narrative. Argue ownership, stage, and trajectory to candidates holding cash and public equity they could sell tomorrow.
• Coach hiring managers and panels on structured evaluation and calibration, including how to tell an impressive candidate from a famous one from the right one.
• Use AI deliberately in your own workflow, and help decide what we automate, what we augment, and what stays human because judgment, fairness, confidentiality, or the law requires a person.
• Leave each search smarter than you found it. Market briefs, calibration notes, and relationships that outlast the req should make the next one faster.
   

What we're looking for

• 7+ years of full lifecycle recruiting, with significant time on technical, research, or AI/ML talent.
• Searches you have won in markets where volume outreach does not work.
• Evidence of closing candidates who held a competing offer from a top-tier AI lab, research organization, or major technology company.
• Experience advising senior leaders on role design and close strategy, and changing their minds with market data.
• Comfort operating where the process does not exist yet.
• ​Ability to attract and close candidates into pre-IPO equity against public-company alternatives
• Track record of success within a talent acquisition function that was new or being rebuilt.

What you'll help enable

What comes next is a hiring challenge. You will help enable a research organization that competes at the front of the field, work that holds up at the premier conferences and partnerships with the labs and universities publishing alongside us, breakthroughs in foundation models and agentic AI, and research that reaches customer systems instead of stopping at the paper.
 

None of it exists before the people do. Not every generation gets a shot at work with this much impact. You will also come out of this with a map of the AI research talent market that very few people hiring against it actually have.

Compensation:
$140-$175k + Bonus

Benefits: 

• Comprehensive healthcare, dental, and vision coverage 

• 401k plan 

• Paid time off (PTO) 

Centific is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, age, mental or physical disability, medical condition, sex (including pregnancy), gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, familial status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.