Founding Technical Recruiter

The Role

Allocate is hiring its first dedicated, in-house technical recruiter - someone who can walk in and immediately own the full cycle recruiting for our engineering, product, and design teams, not just run playbooks handed down by someone else.

You'll partner directly with the founders, CTO, and engineering leaders to translate hiring needs into structured, repeatable processes across engineering, product, and design teams, run full-cycle searches yourself (including specialized roles), manage relationships with any external recruiting partners, and design, build, and implement the recruiting motion and operations - training, rubrics, scorecards - that enables our teams to hire consistently and well while upholding our talent bar as the company scales. This is a hands-on, individual-contributor-to-team-of-one role today.

What You'll Do

• Own full-cycle recruiting across engineering, product, and design teams - from role scoping and sourcing strategy through offer and close - including senior roles and specialized searches that require significant judgment and market fluency.
• Design and run structured interview processes, including interviewer-specific guides, behavioral question banks, and scorecards mapped to role competencies - reducing bias and improving hiring signal.
• Coach and train hiring managers and interviewers, building internal muscle memory so hiring quality doesn't depend solely on you.
• Manage external recruiting partners and agencies where used, ensuring consistent candidate experience and process discipline across internal and external pipelines.
• Own advanced outbound sourcing, with a demonstrated ability to identify and access hard-to-find, passive, and hard-to-reach candidates for niche or highly competitive roles - going well beyond inbound and standard database search.
• Build and own sourcing strategy, including advanced Boolean/direct sourcing for hard-to-fill or competitive roles, and evaluate and deploy AI-powered tools to increase sourcing and pipeline efficiency.
• Shape Allocate's talent and employer brand, developing the story, positioning, and candidate-facing materials that make Allocate compelling to the people we most want to hire.
• Partner with the internal People team on talent and people operations, including how to build and optimize recruiting workflows, reporting, and process discipline that keep the function running smoothly as volume and complexity grow.
• Champion an inclusive, high-integrity hiring process - from job description language through debrief calibration - as a founding value of how Allocate builds its team.

What You Bring

• 10+ years in talent acquisition, with direct experience owning recruiting across EPD functions (Engineering, Product, Data/Research, Design)
• A track record designing and deploying structured interviewing practices - not just running them, but building the frameworks (behavioral question banks, scorecards, interviewer training) from scratch.
• A proven, hands-on track record in outbound sourcing for hard-to-reach and hard-to-identify candidates - deep comfort with advanced Boolean search, creative sourcing channels, and market mapping to surface talent that isn't actively looking or easily found through standard tools.
• Experience evaluating and deploying AI-powered sourcing and recruiting tools (and a desire to keep experimenting) to extend what a lean talent function can do
• Experience managing or coordinating external recruiting partners/agencies alongside internal pipelines.
• A track record building talent/employer branding and talent communities - proactive candidate pipelines and employer positioning that generate inbound interest and shorten future searches.
• Experience building consistent, scalable talent operations - the workflows, reporting, and process infrastructure that keep a recruiting function scalable and consistent.
• Comfort operating as a function of one in an early-stage environment - equally able to run a search personally and to design the systems that outlast any single search.
• A demonstrated commitment to inclusive hiring practices and diverse candidate pipelines.
• Experience with ATS selection, implementation, or migration is a strong plus.

Essential Values & Culture

• Providing our clients with a world-class experience is our number one priority. We obsessively search for ways to improve the experience for our clients and partners. This requires extraordinary response times, proactivity, and ensuring that everything we do - from product strategy to offline communications - reflects a top-tier client experience.
• Challenge convention: Instead of detailing all the reasons why an idea may not work, we constantly question things to determine how a viable idea may be put into motion.
• Commitment to continuous improvement: We find ways to personally scale each day by pushing ourselves up the learning curve.
• Meritocracy, not politics: We place the utmost value on results and rewards through merit, not reward actions driven by political agendas or behavior.
• Civil Discourse is embraced: We believe open, intellectually curious conversations are required to consistently arrive at the best decisions. Respect is paramount in our dealings with one another, but our mission is always to get the right answer collectively, not to be right.
• Embrace technological change: We adopt tools and techniques that make us faster, smarter, and better. We stay open to innovation, especially around AI and automation, and drop outdated methods without hesitation. This includes actively integrating AI-assisted tools into your daily workflow and staying current as the landscape evolves. Complacency kills progress - we value adaptability and curiosity.

Additional Details

• Hybrid Onsite in either the Palo Alto, CA or New York, NY locations
• Travel may be required for company offsites
• Broadband internet connection required
• Location: All I-9 eligible candidates will be considered
• Salary: $180,000 - 210,000 annually
• Benefits: Medical, dental, and vision; 401(k); and responsible vacation time (PTO)
• Employment: Full-time

Pay and benefits

The base pay offered will be determined based on the candidate's experience, location, skills, training, certifications, education, internal equity, and market data. Total compensation may also include a discretionary performance-based bonus. We do not anticipate that candidates hired will begin at the top of the range, though this may occur on a case-by-case basis.