---
title: 'Head of Talent at Prime Intellect'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-talent-prime-intellect-san-francisco-naf4r2rwx21x'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# Head of Talent at Prime Intellect

- **Company:** Prime Intellect
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-08-10
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/primeintellect/cf9f2534-962f-41b2-b240-89f3e85f5b6d

## Job description

## HEAD OF TALENT

## OWN YOUR INTELLIGENCE

Prime Intellect is building the open superintelligence stack: the infrastructure frontier AI labs build internally, made available to every ambitious AI team.

Our platform, Lab, unifies compute, environments, evaluations, secure sandboxes, high-performance training, and deployment into one full-stack system for post-training at frontier scale - from SFT and RL to tool use, agent workflows, and continuously improving production models. We are building open frontier AI: open-source models trained end to end for long-horizon tasks like autonomous research, and the full-stack platform our own research team uses to build them. The next generation of AI companies, enterprises, and research teams do not just need more GPUs. They need the ability to turn their own workflows, tools, data, and feedback loops into superintelligence they own.

Prime Intellect has raised $150M in total funding from Founders Fund, Radical Ventures, NVIDIA, and exceptional AI, infrastructure, and enterprise operators — including Andrej Karpathy, Dwarkesh Patel, and leaders and founders from Ramp, Perplexity, Harvey, Mercor, Zapier, Datadog, Cognition, OpenAI, Thinking Machines, Together AI, SemiAnalysis, LangChain, Browserbase, Cloudflare, Sierra, Databricks, Airbnb, OpenRouter, Standard Intelligence, Fleet, Core Auto, and more.

## ROLE IMPACT

Talent is the single highest-leverage input at Prime Intellect. Every frontier researcher, systems engineer, and operator we hire compounds directly into what the open ecosystem can build. This role owns that compounding.

As Head of Talent, you will own recruiting end-to-end as we scale from ~40 to ~100 people over the next twelve months, weighted heavily toward frontier research and infrastructure engineering — the two most competitive talent markets in tech. You will personally run our most important searches, source candidates who are not on the market, and close them against offers from the largest labs.

Beyond individual hires, you will define how Prime Intellect recruits at scale: building the sourcing engine, closing playbooks, interview architecture, and compensation frameworks that let us maintain an exceptionally high bar while moving faster than incumbents. This is a founding recruiting leader role reporting directly to the founders, with full ownership of the function, meaningful equity, and a direct line into every strategic hiring decision.

## WHAT YOU'LL DO

Own the Highest-Priority Searches

- Personally run our most important searches across research, infrastructure, and leadership hires
- Source candidates directly — through your own network, cold outreach, and targeted campaigns — for roles where inbound alone will never surface the right person
- Close candidates against competing offers from frontier labs, hyperscalers, and top AI startups
- Serve as a trusted partner to the founders and hiring managers on candidate strategy, leveling, and offer construction

Build the Sourcing & Closing Engine

- Design and run the sourcing motion for frontier research talent (labs, PhD programs, top open-source contributors) and elite systems engineering talent (distributed systems, GPU infrastructure, ML systems)
- Build closing playbooks that reflect what actually moves technical candidates: research autonomy, compute access, publication norms, equity, and mission
- Stand up the tooling, data, and pipeline visibility we need to run 60+ hires per year without dropping quality
- Define and enforce the hiring bar across the company as we scale

Systems, Team & Operational Scale

- Hire and lead a small recruiting team over time (sourcers, coordinators, and eventually recruiters), staying deeply hands-on yourself
- Build interview architecture — rubrics, calibration, debriefs, decision-making — that produces consistent hiring outcomes as more people participate
- Own recruiting operations, candidate experience, and reporting end-to-end
- Partner with finance and the founders on compensation philosophy, leveling, and equity strategy as we grow

## REQUIREMENTS

- 5+ years of technical recruiting experience, with meaningful time at a frontier AI lab, top AI startup, or elite technical company
- Direct experience recruiting ML researchers, frontier research talent, or elite systems / distributed engineers — not just "technical roles" broadly
- Proven ability to source and close candidates who are not actively looking, against competing offers from top labs
- Track record of personally owning senior and hard-to-fill searches end-to-end
- Comfort operating as a player-coach: running your own searches while building the systems and eventually the team underneath you
- Strong judgment on candidate quality and leveling; willingness to hold a high bar under pressure
- High ownership, direct communication, and appetite for working closely with founders on the most consequential decisions in the company
- Energized by building a recruiting function from the ground up in a fast-moving environment

## NICE-TO-HAVES

- Prior experience as a founding recruiter, Head of Recruiting, or senior recruiting lead at a fast-growing technical company
- Existing network in the frontier AI research or GPU / ML infrastructure community
- Experience closing candidates against top AI lab offers
- Familiarity with open-source ecosystems and the researchers and engineers who lead them
- Background scaling recruiting operations, tooling, and interview systems at a rapidly growing company

## WHAT WE OFFER

- $250-300k+ cash compensation + meaningful equity
- Flexible work environment
- Visa sponsorship and relocation support
- Professional development budget
- Team off-sites and conference attendance

## About Prime Intellect

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Prime Intellect provides an open, full-stack platform for companies to train, deploy, and continuously improve their own AI models through large-scale distributed reinforcement learning.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Vincent Weisser (CEO), Johannes Hagemann (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI infrastructure, open-source AI research, and agentic training platforms
- **Target customers**: B2B — enterprises and AI labs that want to train custom models without building their own infrastructure; also open-source community contributors
- **Mission**: Democratize frontier AI training by making it accessible to every company and collectively owning the resulting open innovations.

## Products & Services
- **Compute**: Access to GPU clusters (H100, H200, B200+) from 50+ providers, plus on-demand single GPU instances and reserved clusters with InfiniBand networking and SLURM/K8s orchestration.
- **Hosted Training (Lab)**: Managed large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) training without infrastructure overhead, including a 2,500+ environment hub and custom eval benchmarks.
- **Inference**: Serverless or dedicated inference for custom models, with native LoRA support and 1-click deployment.
- **Open-Source Libraries**: `prime-rl` (async RL framework), `verifiers` (environments & evals), and environment hub for collaborative development.
- **INTELLECT-3**: A 100B+ parameter Mixture-of-Experts model trained on their RL stack, achieving state-of-the-art performance for its size.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Total Funding**: $70.44M across multiple rounds (CBInsights, 2026); earlier reports indicated $20.5M in seed rounds, followed by a Series B round of $49.94M led by Founders Fund and other investors.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Founders Fund, CoinFund, Distributed Global, Radical Ventures, Andrej Karpathy, Clem Delangue (Hugging Face), Dylan Patel (SemiAnalysis), Tri Dao (Together AI).
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew 128.6% YoY to 36 employees; 24 active job postings (monthly job growth +26.3%); launched INTELLECT-3 and SYNTHETIC-2 datasets; customers include Ramp and Zap; operates in 9 countries.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Full-stack integrated platform** – compute, post-training, evals, and inference in one place, reducing the fragmentation of building and maintaining AI workflows.
- **Large-scale distributed RL expertise** – proven ability to train 100B+ models across clusters (global training via their RL stack).
- **Open-source ethos** – models, datasets, and libraries are released openly, attracting a community of researchers and developers.
- **Founding team & research edge** – strong ties to frontier AI research, with contributions like prime-rl and self-improving agent loops.

## Strategic Focus
- **Self-improving agents** – building infrastructure that closes the loop from deployment back to training, enabling models to compound performance over time.
- **Scaling RL at extreme sizes** – recent research (RL at 1T Scale) shows commitment to massive-scale reinforcement learning.
- **Enterprise adoption** – adding dedicated solutions engineers and managed workflows for corporate customers.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Seeks “the most ambitious developers” and emphasizes cutting-edge research and engineering. The team includes former engineers from Together AI, Aleph Alpha, and Anyscale.
- **Remote/Hybrid**: Remote-friendly with HQ in San Francisco.
- **Growth trajectory**: Rapidly scaling company (headcount up 128% YoY) with multiple open roles across engineering, research, and go-to-market.
- **Tech stack**: Python, PyTorch, CUDA, Kubernetes, SLURM, Grafana, and a broad modern AI toolchain – opportunity to work on infrastructure-level challenges.

## Sources
1. [primeintellect.ai](https://www.primeintellect.ai/)
2. [linkedin.com/company/primeintellect-ai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/primeintellect-ai)
3. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/PrimeIntellect](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/primeintellect)
4. [cbinsights.com/company/prime-intellect](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/prime-intellect)
5. [docs.primeintellect.ai/introduction](https://docs.primeintellect.ai/introduction)

## Other roles at Prime Intellect

- [Member of Technical Staff - Training Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-training-platform-prime-intellect-san-francisco-4btkkz3tw3ps) — San Francisco, CA
- [Member of Technical Staff - Sandbox Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-sandbox-platform-prime-intellect-san-francisco-qsr7247a01ar) — San Francisco, CA
- [Member of Technical Staff - Inference](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-inference-prime-intellect-7syapkjxntgq)
- [Member of Technical Staff - GPU Infrastructure](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-gpu-infrastructure-prime-intellect-san-francisco-yxe0m7p9mjqy) — San Francisco, CA
- [Member of Technical Staff - Full Stack Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-full-stack-software-engineer-prime-intellect-san-enhkkcn3cfge) — San Francisco, CA
- [Member of Technical Staff - Compute Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-compute-platform-prime-intellect-san-francisco-00b0zmttc2p0) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Engineer - RL Infrastructure](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-rl-infrastructure-prime-intellect-san-francisco-s38mrqzq4m59) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Engineer - Reinforcement Learning](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-reinforcement-learning-prime-intellect-san-francisco-q3tyazz9enkn) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Engineer - Distributed Training](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-distributed-training-prime-intellect-san-francisco-6anh0v1a8nqx) — San Francisco, CA
- [Open Application for Unconventional Talent](https://feeny.ai/job/open-application-for-unconventional-talent-prime-intellect-san-francisco-g7rn6nfnxcg1) — San Francisco, CA