---
title: 'Founding Technical Recruiter/Head of Talent at Elorian'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-technical-recruiter-head-of-talent-elorian-palo-alto-5x11mg261se0'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-04'
---

# Founding Technical Recruiter/Head of Talent at Elorian

- **Company:** Elorian
- **Location:** Palo Alto, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-05-12
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-04
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/elorian-ai-inc/e2029a5d-3211-47d3-ab69-c74a7dbbfdc9

## Job description

## ABOUT US

We are a well-funded, early-stage AI lab focused on building the next generation of frontier multimodal AI models. Founded by former DeepMind researchers, including Andrew Dai, who was previously a leader on Gemini. Our team currently consists of 14 world-class scientists and engineers. We recently raised $55M in seed funding from Striker Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Altimeter Capital, and NVIDIA. We are tackling some of the hardest problems in artificial intelligence, and we are growing fast.

To achieve our ambitious mission, we need to continue bringing the brightest minds in AI research, distributed systems, and engineering onto our team. That’s where you come in. We believe that the best companies require the best people, and we’re looking for a founding recruiter who shares that conviction.

## THE ROLE

This is a unique opportunity to be the first recruiter at Elorian. As our first dedicated Talent Acquisition hire, you will be the architect of our hiring engine. You will work directly with the founders to define our talent strategy, build out our recruitment processes from scratch, and scale our team with exceptional individuals.

This is not a standard recruiting role. You will be hunting for some of the rarest and most sought-after talent in the world, people working at top AI labs, premier academic institutions, and elite tech companies. You will need to be strategic, deeply embedded in the AI ecosystem, and capable of compellingly articulating our vision to top-tier candidates.

This role is for someone who thrives in ambiguity, loves the craft of technical recruiting, and wants to leave a lasting mark on a company at its earliest stage.

## WHAT YOU WILL DO

- Full-Cycle Recruiting: Own the end-to-end recruitment process for technical (Research Scientists, Machine Learning Engineers, Systems Engineers) and with the potential to expand to non-technical roles.
- Strategic Sourcing: Proactively identify and creatively engage passive, top-tier talent in the highly competitive frontier AI landscape.
- Process Building: Scale our ATS, interview panels, and candidate evaluation frameworks to ensure an unbiased, efficient, and exceptionally high-bar hiring process.
- Founder Partnership: Act as a strategic advisor to the founders. Help define role requirements, calibrate compensation, and shape the company’s organizational structure as we grow.
- Candidate Experience: Design a world-class candidate experience that reflects our company’s culture at every touchpoint. From the first outreach to the closing conversation, ensure every candidate feels valued and respected.
- Employer Branding: Help establish our identity in the market. Organize events, manage our presence in the AI community, and build a talent pipeline for the future.

## WHO YOU ARE

- Experienced: You have 5+ years of experience in technical recruiting, with a strong track record of hiring for AI, ML, or deep tech roles at a high-growth startup or a major tech company.
- Have a Strong Network: You have a deep understanding of the AI ecosystem and know how to find and engage talent from top labs (e.g., DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta MSL) and leading universities.
- A Closer: You have a proven ability to close highly sought-after candidates in competitive markets navigate complex compensation packages (salary + early-stage equity), and handling competing offers
- Scrappy & Autonomous: You thrive in ambiguity. You don’t need a massive recruiting coordination team behind you to get things done; you are happy to roll up your sleeves and build from the ground up.
- Technically Literate: You don't need to write CUDA kernels, but you understand the difference between a pre-training researcher, an alignment scientist, and an ML infrastructure engineer.
- Mission-Driven: You are genuinely passionate about the future of AI and want to play a pivotal role in building a company that pushes the boundaries of what is possible.

## WHAT WE OFFER

- Impact: Ground-floor opportunity to build the culture and team of a frontier AI lab with direct partnership with leadership on every search.
- Meaningful Equity: Significant equity ownership in a fast-growing, well-funded startup with real, substantial upside
- Competitive Salary: Top-of-market compensation package.
- Health & Wellness: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
- Flexibility: Flexible PTO and a trusting, output-driven work environment.

## About Elorian

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Elorian is an early-stage AI research lab building frontier multimodal AI models with a native ability to reason visually, moving beyond text-dependent systems.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed/Series A; $55M raised)
- **Headquarters**: Palo Alto, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2025
- **Founders**: Andrew Dai (Co-founder & CEO), Seth Neel (Co-founder & Founding Researcher), Forrest Huang (Founding Researcher), and others

## Core Business
- Primary industry: Artificial Intelligence / Visual Reasoning Research
- Target customers: B2B, enterprises in robotics, medicine, science, architecture, automotive, satellite imagery, and defense
- Mission or purpose statement: Building systems that natively understand and reason through the visual medium the way humans do, enabling AI to move from simple perception to higher-level reasoning in the physical world.

## Products & Services
- **Frontier Multimodal AI Models**: A research product lab developing new architectures for multimodal reasoning. These models directly interact with and manipulate visual representations (structure, relationships, constraints) rather than translating images into text before reasoning. Potential applications span engineering design, robotics, medical diagnostics, weather monitoring, disaster response, and precision agriculture.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding – $55 million
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Striker Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Altimeter Capital, with participation from 49 Palms and other investors; advisor and investor Jeff Dean (Google DeepMind Chief Scientist).
- **Growth Signals**: Came out of stealth on April 9, 2026; monthly employee growth of +28.6% (8 employees as of July 2026); website traffic surged +421.6% month-over-month; high-profile founding team from Google DeepMind and Apple; active hiring (Founding Technical Recruiter/Head of Talent).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Unique Approach**: Models are trained to reason directly with visual representations, bypassing the fragile text-dependent two-step process used by current vision-language models. This enables understanding of spatial, structural, and relational complexity that text-only or text-translated systems cannot handle.
- **Founding Team**: Researchers who led breakthroughs in pretraining, data, and vision modeling at Google DeepMind and Apple (including contributions to Gemini). Small, focused team with deep domain expertise.
- **Backing**: $55M from top-tier investors and AI luminaries like Jeff Dean, signaling confidence in the research direction.

## Strategic Focus
- **Visual Reasoning as a Path to AGI**: Elorian believes that native visual reasoning is a critical step toward truly general AI. Current priorities include advancing new training techniques, scaling the team with world-class researchers and engineers, and applying their models to real-world problems in robotics, science, and industry.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Early-stage research lab with a tight-knit team of world-class scientists and engineers. Emphasis on long-term research and pushing the boundaries of AI.
- **Work Policy**: Hybrid workspace – employees engage in a combination of remote and on-site work (Palo Alto office).
- **Perks & Highlights**: Opportunity to work on some of the hardest problems in AI, with direct impact on fundamental research. Strong backing from leading investors allows for significant compute and resources. High growth trajectory with potential for rapid career advancement.

## Sources
1. [elorian.ai](https://elorian.ai/)
2. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/elorian-ai)
3. [bloomberg.com](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-09/ex-google-deepmind-researchers-debut-startup-called-elorian-focused-on-visual-ai)
4. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/elorian-ai-inc)

## Other roles at Elorian

- [Inference Infrastructure Engineer, Serving](https://feeny.ai/job/inference-infrastructure-engineer-serving-elorian-palo-alto-ec4rcp2xrvr7) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Reinforcement Learning Infrastructure Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/reinforcement-learning-infrastructure-engineer-elorian-palo-alto-kkdrj7xwx678) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Member of Technical Staff](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-elorian-palo-alto-g0n7fpjn35q2) — Palo Alto, CA
- [General Interest](https://feeny.ai/job/general-interest-elorian-palo-alto-6w6gkx6aggb4) — Palo Alto, CA