---
title: 'Founding Recruiter at Bespoke Labs'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-recruiter-bespoke-labs-remote-hnw3zbanavm6'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Founding Recruiter at Bespoke Labs

- **Company:** Bespoke Labs
- **Location:** Remote
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-02-05
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/bespokelabs/d6373010-a0d9-46e3-8a21-969854e89adc

## Job description

## About Bespoke Labs

Bespoke Labs is an applied AI research lab pioneering data and RL environment curation for training and evaluating agents. Recently, we curated [OpenThoughts](https://open-thoughts.ai/) and [OpenThoughts-Agent](https://www.open-thoughts.ai/blog/openthoughts-agent), we have been part of [Terminal Bench](https://www.tbench.ai/) and [Terminal Bench Science](https://www.tbench.ai/news/terminal-bench-science-0-1). We [taught](https://www.bespokelabs.ai/blog/improving-multi-turn-tool-use-with-reinforcement-learning) agents to do multi-turn tool-calling with reinforcement learning, and are actively curating some of the best RL environments for SDLC and RSI. Bespoke is uniquely positioned to capture a large market share of data and RL environment curation.

## About the Role

You're our first full-time recruiter, and you're going to build the thing that lets us grow: the engine that hires the RL-environments talent we run on. Do it well and talent stops being the reason we can't move faster. You'll close hires yourself and build the machine behind them, the pipeline, the interview process, the rhythm with hiring managers. Technical recruiting is yours, end to end. Here's what we care about most: have you done this before? If you've sourced and closed exceptional engineers in a market that fights you for them, and built the process that made it repeatable, let's talk.

## What you'll do

- Hire 10-15 technical people in year one, mostly RL-environments Engineers, Strategic Project Leads (SPLs), and Research Engineers, every one at our bar.
- Keep median time-to-fill on priority RL-env engineering roles near 30 days, posting open to offer accepted, because you're always running a warm pipeline instead of starting cold.
- Land a 75%+ offer-accept rate, including the head-to-head fights against Scale AI, Surge AI, Mercor, and the frontier labs.
- Improve ATS pipeline conversions, scorecard-based interviews, a sourcing playbook, and a real intake-and-debrief cadence with hiring managers.
- Bring in people who perform and stay, and put Bespoke on the map in the RL-env and data-curation talent world through inbound and referrals.

## What we're looking for

- 3+ years of technical recruiting experience, ideally at a startup or in AI/ML
- Strong sourcing skills and a network in the AI/engineering talent market that is always-on and warm, and you know where RL-env talent actually is.
- Ability to move fast, operate independently, wear multiple hats, sell a hard mission, and win candidates who have other offers on the table.
- Familiarity with AI/ML roles and terminology, specially on RL environments, agentic tasks, and ML/infra work, and tell a strong engineer from one who just sounds like one.
- Ability to run on data to improve time-to-fill, accept rate, funnel conversion, source of hire.

## What We Offer

- Location: Mountain View, CA (Onsite)
- Base Salary: $150,000 – $225,000 USD / year
- Additional Comp: 25% performance-based bonus + equity

## Benefits & Perks

- Health, dental, and vision coverage
- 401(k)
- Daily onsite lunch provided
- Visa sponsorship and relocation support available
- Direct impact on how the industry trains and evaluates agents

We encourage you to apply even if you don't meet every qualification. We value diverse perspectives and are happy to discuss how your unique background could be a great fit for this role.

## About Bespoke Labs

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Bespoke Labs is an applied AI research lab building company-scale RL environments and data curation infrastructure to train reliable, production-grade AI agents.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage)
- **Headquarters**: Mountain View, California, United States (with an office in Santa Clara, CA)
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Mahesh Sathiamoorthy (CEO, formerly Google DeepMind) and Alex Dimakis (CSO, Professor at UC Berkeley)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Applied AI Research / Software Development (Agent Infrastructure)
- **Target customers**: B2B — Frontier AI labs (e.g., Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind) and enterprises needing to train, evaluate, and optimize complex, long-horizon AI agents for production.
- **Mission**: To build the environment infrastructure for the agent revolution, making AI agents dependable in production by creating entire digital worlds for training.

## Products & Services
- **Company-Scale RL Environments**: Infrastructure that simulates real codebases and microservices, allowing agents to master complex, long-horizon workflows required for production.
- **Agent Evaluation & Optimization (GEPA)**: An evolutionary algorithm (GEPA optimizer) that automates prompt and policy searches, achieving superior accuracy faster than manual prompt engineering. Over 200 teams use GEPA in production.
- **Production-Grade RL & Benchmarking**: Collaborative research in RL, data curation, and benchmarking to ensure training environments keep pace with the advancing frontier of model capabilities.
- **OpenThoughts Dataset**: One of the best open reasoning datasets (10k+ monthly downloads on Hugging Face), cited in ICLR 2026.
- **Terminal-Bench**: The first environment-based benchmark for agentic systems, cited by Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind, published at ICLR 2026.
- **Bespoke-MiniCheck & Bespoke-MiniChart**: SOTA models developed in-house for fact-checking and chart understanding.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Total Funding**: $8.25M (Seed Round, June 2024).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Lead investor is **8VC**. Advisors include Tasso Argyros (VP of Eng at Databricks, ex-CEO of ActionIQ), Joseph Gonzalez (Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, creator of LMSYS/vLLM), and Greg Durrett (Associate Professor at NYU). Cited by Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind.
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew **+238.5% year-over-year** (from ~8 to 28 employees). Monthly headcount growth is **+33.3%**. Active job postings increased **+183.3% quarterly** (34 open positions). Over 200 teams use GEPA in production. OpenThoughts sees 10k+ monthly downloads.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-Mover in Agent Environments**: They identified the bottleneck for agent reliability is the environment, not the model, and are building the foundational infrastructure for this new paradigm.
- **SOTA Research Output**: Published work at ICLR 2026 (Terminal-Bench, GEPA, OpenThoughts) that is being cited and used by frontier labs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind).
- **Strong Academic & Industry Ties**: Founded by a Google DeepMind alum and a UC Berkeley professor, with advisors from Databricks, UC Berkeley, and NYU. Team includes alumni from Google, Scale AI, Microsoft, and AI2.
- **Open Source Influence**: OpenThoughts is a widely used open reasoning dataset, building community credibility and attracting top talent.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scale the Environment Infrastructure**: Build increasingly complex and realistic digital worlds for training agents, moving beyond demos to production-grade reliability.
- **Expand Enterprise Adoption**: Help enterprises evaluate and optimize agents in environments that mirror their specific systems and processes.
- **Continue Frontier Research**: Push the boundaries of RL, data curation, and benchmarking to maintain a lead in the agent training space.
- **Talent Acquisition**: Aggressively hiring researchers and engineers (34 open roles) to scale the team and the product.

## Why Work Here
- **High-Impact, Cutting-Edge AI Work**: Opportunity to work on one of the most important problems in AI — making agents reliable. The team is described as "exceptional researchers and engineers."
- **Strong Research Culture**: The lab publishes at top venues (ICLR) and contributes to open source (OpenThoughts). The work is a blend of product engineering and fundamental research.
- **Rapid Growth Stage**: With 238% YoY headcount growth and a recent seed round, this is an early-stage opportunity to shape the company's culture and technical direction.
- **Office-First, Collaborative Environment**: Based in Mountain View/Santa Clara with an emphasis on in-person collaboration. The team is small (28 people) but growing fast.
- **Notable Alumni & Hiring Sources**: The team attracts talent from Scale AI, Berkeley RISE Lab, Google DeepMind, and Grammarly, indicating a high-caliber peer group.
- **Open Roles**: Actively hiring for GPU/CUDA Engineers, Product Engineers, Scientific ML Engineers (PhD Interns), and Quantitative Financial Specialists, among others.

## Sources
1. [bespokelabs.ai](https://www.bespokelabs.ai/)
2. [bespokelabs.ai/about-us](https://www.bespokelabs.ai/about-us)
3. [linkedin.com/company/bespokelabsai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/bespokelabsai)
4. [pitchbook.com/profiles/company/651710-80](https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/651710-80)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/bespokelabs](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/bespokelabs)

## Other roles at Bespoke Labs

- [RL Environments Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/rl-environments-engineer-bespoke-labs-mountain-view-r1brn5r4z8ex) — Mountain View, CA
- [Desktop/System Administrator](https://feeny.ai/job/desktop-system-administrator-bespoke-labs-bengaluru-f4e04cka1jkn) — Bengaluru, India
- [Backend Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/backend-engineer-bespoke-labs-mountain-view-2wfkmwxgk7se) — Mountain View, CA
- [Full Stack Engineer - MTV](https://feeny.ai/job/full-stack-engineer-mtv-bespoke-labs-mountain-view-mv3kv8nrts8f) — Mountain View, CA
- [Full Stack Engineer - BLR, India](https://feeny.ai/job/full-stack-engineer-blr-india-bespoke-labs-bengaluru-pazpmr8p8dp8) — Bengaluru, India
- [Engagement Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/engagement-manager-bespoke-labs-mountain-view-4aevsp00m946) — Mountain View, CA
- [Research Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-bespoke-labs-mountain-view-vv4mp69f8z1b) — Mountain View, CA
- [Product Engineer (Bangalore)](https://feeny.ai/job/product-engineer-bangalore-bespoke-labs-bengaluru-zg7eead9kgg5) — Bengaluru, India
- [Design and Brand Storyteller](https://feeny.ai/job/design-and-brand-storyteller-bespoke-labs-mountain-view-asg657e8gnwr) — Mountain View, CA
- [AI Enterprise Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-enterprise-engineer-bespoke-labs-mountain-view-cvams3d3p42m) — Mountain View, CA