Business Talent Acquisition Lead

San Francisco, CA · In-office (5 days/week) · Full-time

AfterQuery is a research lab investigating the boundaries and capabilities of artificial intelligence through novel datasets and experimentation. Our customers are the frontier foundation model labs — we serve all of them. We are based in San Francisco and have raised funding from top investors including Y Combinator and BoxGroup, ex-partners from Lightspeed and Index Ventures, and senior leadership at Google DeepMind and Meta GenAI. Our founding team brings backgrounds from Jane Street, Meta, Citadel Securities, Google, Palantir, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Silver Lake.

Our edge comes from the caliber of the team we hire — and how rigorously we identify, attract, and close it. We are growing quickly, the work is consequential, and the bar is high.

This is our first dedicated Business Talent Acquisition hire, working directly with the founding team. You will own end-to-end hiring for our business and operations functions — Strategic Projects, Operations, GTM, and every business-side function we build out. This is not a typical recruiting role: you will operate as a builder, designing the sourcing engine, interview rubrics, and closing motion that bring in elite talent across every business-side hire we make.

You should be excited to recruit at the same caliber bar that built the rest of the team — Jane Street, Citadel Securities, Meta, Google, Palantir, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Silver Lake, MBB consulting, top PE, and top hedge funds. The most consequential talent in the market is increasingly choosing AI. We need someone who can identify it, get them in the room, and close.

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  Own end-to-end recruiting for AfterQuery's business and operations roles — sourcing, screening, interviewing, and closing top-tier candidates across Strategic Project Operations, GTM, and other key business functions we build out.

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  Build deep, proactive talent pipelines from elite finance, consulting, PE, and tech firms — the same caliber bar as our existing team — and convert them.

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  Partner directly with the executive and founding team to define hiring profiles, prioritize searches, and design rigorous interview processes that test for agency, drive, and judgment.

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  Drive recruiting infrastructure across the company as an early hire — scorecards, interview rubrics, sourcing tooling, the candidate experience, and the offer-and-close motion that turns interest into signed contracts.

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  Close candidates and represent AfterQuery's mission, momentum, and opportunity compellingly to the highest-bar talent in the market.

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  Treat recruiting as a measurable function — instrument the funnel, model conversion at every stage, and iterate on what's working.

• 5-10+ years of experience across agency and in-house recruiting. A track record of identifying, attracting, and closing elite talent.

• Intense work ethic, agency, and drive. You’re a builder first, and thrive in ambiguity.

• Competitive nature and demonstrated past success across whatever you've done.

• Strong leadership and communication skills — you can hold your own opposite a founder, a Jane Street trader, or a GTM leader, and you build pipelines that founders trust.

• A genuine interest in the AfterQuery thesis: that the future of AI is bottlenecked on human data, and that the talent generating, designing, and bringing that data to market is the most important hiring decision the company makes.

• High agency, low ego, speedy but thoughtful. Comfortable in a 5-day in-office SF environment that prizes speed and direct feedback.

• Ex-recruiting at a top executive search firm (e.g., Spencer Stuart, Russell Reynolds, True Search, Daversa), a top-tier in-house recruiting team, or a high-growth tech/AI startup.

• Proven track record of scaling recruiting operations through rapid headcount growth.

• Prior experience hiring for finance, consulting, PE, or operationally rigorous business roles — and a personal network in those pools.

• Making a pivot into AI from a strong track record elsewhere — finance, consulting, search, or operating roles — with demonstrated success.

• You'll define the business-side hiring engine for a fast growing company in the AI training-data category.

• A real seat at the strategy table — every business hire you make compounds AfterQuery's trajectory, and you'll own that.

• A small, dense team with high standards. You'll work directly with the founding team to bring in talent we'd be sad to lose, and we work hard to keep them.

AfterQuery is an equal opportunity employer. We hire on merit and evaluate everyone against the same bar.