The posting
THE ROLE
We're looking for a Talent Engineer — a senior, principal level individual contributor who owns the entire recruiting cycle and client relationship: strategy, execution, and everything in between.
You're not a sourcer who occasionally gets client-facing, and you're not a recruiter who hands off the hard problems. You're the person a founder trusts to design the hiring plan, write the job description that attracts the right person, provides strong judgement and education to run a real process, and then go find and close the right candidates.
This role exists for someone who thinks like an operator. You're equally comfortable in a strategy conversation with a CTO but also building innovative sourcing lists late at night because you’ve uncovered a unique angle. You build and use AI tools, not as a novelty but as leverage, so you can move faster and smarter than recruiters running a manual process.
Note: This role is fully remote, but will require on average 4-5 hours of overlap a day within the 9-6pm PT timezone due to client, team, and candidate overlap.
WHAT YOU’LL OWN
- Client Partnership & Strategy
- Take full ownership of the client relationship from start to finish — you are the face of PCT for your accounts, not just a name on a status update.
- Collaborate with founders and leaders to design hiring plans, moving beyond simply following their instructions (we are strategic partners, not task takers).
- Guide founders and first-time hiring managers on building a high-signal interview process, and coach interview teams to execute it effectively.
- Provide market intelligence and competitive context to every client conversation - comp, talent availability, hiring trends
- Search Execution
- Run full-cycle searches across Engineering and adjacent technical functions (Product, Design, Data, Security) — sourcing, screening, and closing
- Source and identify hard-to-find technical talent using Ashby, Gem, Juicebox, Pin, and other AI-native tools — the finding is still yours, not something you hand off
- Assess senior and staff+ candidates with the judgment to know what separates good from truly exceptional
- Build pipelines that go beyond inbound and referrals. Creative, non-obvious sourcing strategies are your default, not your exception
- Building & Optimization
- Treat your workflow as something to be engineered, not just executed. Develop the tools, prompts, sequences, and automations that make your searches faster and more effective.
- Use AI tools like Claude to work smarter, whether it's synthesizing research, drafting outreach, or analyzing your pipeline.
- Conduct structured A/B tests on outreach messaging, sourcing channels, and process design, and use the results to inform and improve your approach.
- Share your innovations — when you create a better way to do something, it becomes the standard for how PCT operates.
- Data & Judgment
- Track pipeline health, pass-through rates, and search progress, using this data to drive decisions with clients—not just to report on them.
- Recognize when to rely on the data and when to trust pattern recognition built from experience
WHAT YOU’LL BRING
- Track Record: You have independently managed full-cycle technical searches and quickly earned the trust of a CTO or VP of Engineering within your first few conversations. You take ownership of outcomes, not just activities.
- Range: You are comfortable handling all aspects of the job—sourcing, screening, client strategy, job description writing, and interview design—and you see these as interconnected rather than separate roles.
- Builder's Mindset: You have built or significantly improved a workflow, tool, or process, and you find real satisfaction in automating what was once manual work.
- AI Fluency: You use Claude or comparable tools daily as working partners for research, drafting, and analysis, and you are genuinely excited by the potential of agentic and API-driven tools in recruiting—not just aware they exist.
- Creative Problem Solving: When common sourcing channels or messaging approaches don’t work, you don’t wait for direction—you proactively test alternative solutions.
- Judgment: You can clearly articulate what distinguishes a strong candidate from an exceptional one, and you trust your judgment enough to confidently push back on clients when necessary.
- Communication: You are able to write a job description, brief a founder, coach a hiring manager, and craft outreach that gets responses—communicating clearly and independently at every step.
- Autonomy: You manage your own schedule, handle multiple client relationships and searches at once, and make sound decisions without waiting for approval.
THIS ROLE PROBABLY ISN'T FOR YOU IF
- You want to focus solely on either sourcing or client strategy—this role requires both, always.
- You require a fixed playbook and structure to feel confident.
- Your experience with AI tools is limited to ChatGPT, or you haven't built anything truly useful with AI.
- You require significant ramp-up time before operating independently with senior stakeholders.
- You're seeking a people management track right now, rather than delving deeply as an IC.
- You approach things with a fixed playbook and aren't excited to think from first principles.
CONTRACT TERMS
This is a contract-to-hire position with strong potential for permanent conversion based on performance and business needs. PCT believes in growing with talented people who are committed to building exceptional teams. Competitive compensation provided with placement-based bonuses.
