Pensive

Founding Technical Recruiter at Pensive (San Francisco, CA)

Pensive· San Francisco, CA·

Role details

Work type
Onsite
Employment
Full-Time

Job description

About Builders

Every star athlete has an agency. Builders represents exceptional builders and connects them with startups that match their ambition. We work with top Seed–Series F startups, including Ramp, Greptile, Poetic, and Blockit, to place exceptional talent across every function, from engineering to operations.

About the Role

We’re looking for a founding Technical Recruiter to build and own our AI-native recruiting agency, Builders. In this role, you’ll work directly with the founders of Pensive and the founders of our partner companies, from defining roles and sourcing exceptional candidates to closing offers. Your job is to help us hire and place exceptional engineers quickly while delivering a thoughtful, high-quality candidate experience. Because this is a founding role, you’ll also help shape our recruiting strategy, processes, systems, and tooling as the company grows.

Who You Are

  • 1+ year of technical recruiting experience at a fast-growing technology company or a top recruiting agency.
  • Strong grasp of technical skills, engineering roles, and how engineering organizations work.
  • A proven closer who has landed senior and staff-level engineers in competitive markets, and can clearly explain how.
  • Comfortable with speed and ambiguity. Priorities shift, roles evolve, and the hiring bar keeps moving, and you adapt without losing momentum.
  • Autonomous and decisive. You can operate as a team of one, make trade-offs without hand-holding, and iterate quickly.
  • Comfortable using AI, automation, and new tools to improve sourcing, evaluation, and recruiting workflows.

Nice to Have

  • Experience working at a recruiting agency.
  • CS degree or prior software engineering experience.
  • Experience with AI-native or agentic recruiting tools.

Why work at Pensive

  • High-impact mission: Directly improve the experience of millions of college students and free up instructors from tedious grading work.
  • Tight-knit, early-stage team: ~10 employees, offering significant ownership and influence for early hires.
  • Remote-friendly location: HQ in San Francisco (1 Brady Street, Suite A-725) with hybrid flexibility implied by distributed team (US, Philippines, South Korea).
  • Competitive compensation: Salary ranges for open roles are $135K–$300K (estimated), typical for well-funded Bay Area startups.
  • Strong investor backing: Backed by top-tier VCs (a16z, Sequoia, Mayfield) and a partnership with Anthropic, providing stability and resources.
  • Culture of innovation: Active in academic research and conferences, encouraging a learning-oriented engineering culture.

Application questions