Technical Recruiter

About the role

Intelligence Security Laboratories is a new and fast-growing non-profit working at the intersection of AI and security. We're a small, ambitious team scaling quickly, and we're looking for a Technical Recruiter to build on the foundation that supports our growth.

In this role, you'll lead recruitment at ISL. We expect to more than double our team over the next year, and much of what we need is quite scarce, with some roles drawing on a talent pool small enough to count. The core of the job is understanding what our technical and research teams need, working out what capacity has to exist and by when, and recruiting to fill it.

Our hiring spans infrastructure engineering, technical programme management, research leadership, and the specialist work we contract for, including formal methods, hardware, electrical, and mechanical engineering. That means going deep enough into the work to understand needs, and it means designing the assessments that tell us whether a candidate will succeed.

We're looking for someone with the judgement to see what a team is missing before anyone has articulated it, and the technical grounding to know who would fix it. That may not come from a career in recruitment. You might have built or grown a technical team or organisation, scoped the roles you then had to fill, or learned to predict which hires would work out.

Key Responsibilities

• Understand what our technical and research teams need and will need, and work out what capacity has to exist and by when
• Turn those needs into job descriptions including scope, seniority, and requirements
• Headhunt for scarce skill sets, including internationally
• Design the work tests and scoring rubrics used to assess technical candidates. Revise them as we learn what predicts a good hire
• Lead and develop the recruitment function of ISL
• Own our applicant tracking system and hiring infrastructure
• Decide what we assess, how we assess it, and whether it is working

Qualifications

Required Skills

• Experience assessing what a technical team needs and planning capacity against it, rather than responding to vacancies as they arise
• Experience building or growing a technical team, function, or organization
• Enough technical depth to design work tests that discriminate between strong and mediocre candidates across our technical disciplines
• Experience acting as hiring manager for technical roles
• A track record of getting the best out of people, both in the work you get from those you manage and in what you draw out of candidates during assessment
• Familiarity with developments in AI safety and security
• Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to write clearly for candidates and for internal decision records
• Comfort operating with ambiguity in a small, fast-moving organization
• Authorization to work in the United States

Nice-to-have Experience

• A degree in engineering, computer science, or a related technical field
• Recruitment experience, in any context
• Familiarity with AI safety, national security, systems engineering, and the organizations working in these spaces
• Experience headhunting where the qualified population is small
• Competence with an applicant tracking system, ideally Ashby
• Experience in a small or early-stage organization
• A background in assessment design, or in industrial and organizational psychology
• Current or past U.S. government security clearance

Compensation and Benefits

• Salary range: $145k - $225k/annum set according to title and role family
• In addition to salary:
• Additional $25k salary if you choose to relocate to Washington, DC
• Relocation support of $5k - $10k, depending on whether you're moving domestically or internationally
• Full medical, dental and vision cover, effective from your first day
• HSA available
• Unlimited paid time off. We ask everyone to take at least 20 days a year, and would encourage more
• Stipends for training, wellness and home-office set-up
• Up to three company retreats a year
• Retirement contributions