---
title: 'Founding Technical Recruiter at Pensive'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-technical-recruiter-pensive-san-francisco-fbvxnc70r7w8'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Founding Technical Recruiter at Pensive

- **Company:** Pensive
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-08-25
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/pensive/c8260faa-befc-4b47-858d-4404d323a733

## Job description

## About Builders

Every star athlete has an agency. [Builders](https://builders.cv/) 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.

## About Pensive

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Pensive provides an AI-powered grading and tutoring platform for STEM courses at colleges and universities, automating assessment creation, grading, and personalized student feedback.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2024 (implied by funding timeline and early milestones)
- **Founders**: Yoonseok Yang (CEO, Co-founder), MinJune Kim (CTO, Co-founder)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Educational Technology (EdTech), specifically AI in higher education
- **Target customers**: B2B – colleges, universities, and individual instructors teaching STEM courses (e.g., computer science, engineering, math)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To transform teaching and learning at scale by providing instructor-led AI tools that save time on grading and deliver richer, more personalized feedback to students.

## Products & Services
- **Pensive AI Grader**: AI-powered grading assistant that creates rubrics, grades assignments 10x faster, and provides personalized feedback to students. Designed for large STEM courses.
- **Pensive AI Tutor**: A scalable small-group tutoring system that uses AI to facilitate tutoring sessions, demonstrated in a paper accepted at SIGCSE 2025.
- **Pensive Discuss**: A research-driven tool (presented at SIGCSE 2025) enabling scalable small-group CS tutoring with AI.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of $6.8M–$6.9M (Seed Round led by Mayfield Fund, closed ~February 2026). Includes a prior Grant led by WGU Labs.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Mayfield Fund (lead), Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Reach Capital, Bass Investment, Anti Fund, WGU Labs. Partnership with Anthropic (for AI models).
- **Growth Signals**: 1,000+ instructors across 100+ institutions (as of Feb 2026); 64% of workforce in the US with small teams in Philippines and South Korea; cited by top institutions like Columbia University and UC Berkeley; paper accepted at SIGCSE 2025; active presence at ASEE 2025 conference.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Instructor-led AI**: Unlike fully automated grading tools, Pensive emphasizes instructor control and oversight, reducing concerns about cheating and academic integrity.
- **STEM specialization**: Deep focus on STEM courses (CS, engineering, math) where grading is complex and time-consuming.
- **Research-backed**: Academic papers at top conferences (SIGCSE) validate their approach and pedagogy.
- **Partnership with Anthropic**: Leverages cutting-edge AI models (likely Claude) for robust and reliable feedback.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling adoption**: Expanding beyond early-adopter institutions into broader higher education markets.
- **Product depth**: Enhancing the AI grader and tutor with richer feedback capabilities and new features.
- **Sales & GTM**: Hiring Founding Account Executives to drive enterprise sales to universities and colleges.
- **International growth**: Presence in South Korea and Philippines signals potential expansion into Asia.

## Why Work Here
- **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.

## Sources
1. [pensive.com - Careers Page](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/pensive)
2. [CB Insights - Pensive Company Profile](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/pensive)
3. [LinkedIn - Pensive Company Page](https://www.linkedin.com/company/pensiveai)
4. [Basin - Pensive Open Roles & Salary Data](https://basin.cv/companies/pensive)
5. [pensive.com - Terms of Service](https://www.pensive.com/schools/terms-of-service)

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