Founding Recruiter

Responsibilities

You will own the end-to-end internal hiring process, partnering with the founders to build a world-class team in San Francisco. This includes sourcing, screening, closing candidates, and building scalable recruiting workflows and employer branding.

Requirements

The ideal candidate has 2-6+ years of recruiting experience, preferably in a high-growth startup or agency environment. You must have a proven track record of closing engineering and GTM talent and proficiency with modern recruiting tools like Ashby and LinkedIn Recruiter.

Skills

• Full-cycle recruiting
• Sourcing
• Candidate screening
• Interview coordination
• Closing candidates
• LinkedIn Recruiter
• Ashby
• Applicant tracking systems
• Pipeline management
• Employer branding
• Technical recruiting
• GTM recruiting
• Strategic planning
• Relationship management
• Data-driven recruiting

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Equity
• Relocation bonus
• Housing bonus
• Health insurance
• Dental insurance
• Vision insurance
• 401(k) with company match

About this role

About Terac
Terac is building the infrastructure for accessing human capability on demand. We are working toward a future where Terac deeply understands:
What every person is capable of, what they want, and where they can thrive
What work our customers need completed and what success requires
What creates a great match between the two
With this understanding, Terac can intelligently allocate human capability to the work where it creates the most value for both our experts and customers. Today, our initial wedge is providing specialized experts for AI training, evaluation, market research, and other expert-driven research.
We place 1,000s of experts per month and pay our experts, on average, over $90/hr. We're a team of 15 based in San Francisco. We've raised $16M from SignalFire, Emergence, Audacious, and SV Angel, and we work with leading AI labs and research companies.
The problems we get to solve
Terac is a two-sided marketplace, and the most interesting problems live where the money moves. Some of the fun ones:
Pricing work we've never seen before: every project is different (a cardiologist for a 30-minute interview, 200 Amharic transcribers, a team of licensed engineers building RL environments), and we have to quote it in hours, not weeks.
Setting the right pay for experts: rates vary by domain, country, and urgency. Pay too little and the best experts walk. Pay too much and the project stops working for the customer.
Managing spread and take rate: the gap between what customers pay and what experts earn funds everything we build, and it looks different across market research, AI training, and data collection.
Liquidity on both sides: the right experts available the moment a customer needs them, across thousands of niches, without burning out supply or overpromising to demand.
Moving money globally: we pay experts across dozens of countries every month, often before customers pay us, which creates real working capital, FX, and fraud challenges.
About the role
The people we hire over the next year will define Terac. Today, the founders run recruiting themselves across engineering, GTM, operations, and strategic projects roles. You will be our first recruiter and own internal hiring end to end, partnering directly with the CEO and CTO to build a world-class, in-person team in San Francisco.
You'll recruit the people who solve the problems above, and those problems are a big part of how you'll sell candidates on Terac.
You thrive in ambiguity, have exceptional judgment about people, and treat closing a great candidate like closing a deal.
You will:
Own full-cycle recruiting: sourcing, outreach, screening, interview coordination, references, and closing across every function.
Source relentlessly: find exceptional people through LinkedIn, Juicebox, referrals, our investor networks, events, and any other channel you can dream up.
Close candidates: sell the Terac vision, run offer conversations alongside the founders, and make every candidate's experience great, whether or not they join.
Build the hiring machine: interview loops, scorecards, Ashby workflows, pipeline metrics, and an employer brand that makes Terac a place top people want to work.
Run recruiting events: dinners, hackathons, and campus outreach to build long-term talent pipelines.
You have:
2-6+ years of recruiting experience, with meaningful time at a high-growth startup or top agency
A track record of closing hard-to-hire engineering and GTM talent
Strong familiarity with LinkedIn Recruiter, Ashby (or similar ATS), and modern sourcing tools
Strong judgment and the ability to prioritize under pressure
You likely have experience in:
Being an early or first recruiter at a startup and scaling a team through hypergrowth
Exposure to marketplaces, AI, or technical hiring
Misc
Compensation: Competitive salary, meaningful equity vested over four years, $10K relocation bonus (for moving to the Bay Area), and an additional $5k housing bonus (if you move within 0.5 miles of our office), Health, Dental, Vision insurance, 401(k) with company match
Growth opportunities: You're joining Terac at one of the earliest stages and will have an opportunity to shape and grow with the company as a founding member.

About Terac

Research Services · 11-50 employees · headquartered in San Francisco, California · founded 2025