---
title: 'Talent Engineer at People Culture Talent'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/talent-engineer-people-culture-talent-united-states-9es37jcjc5fj'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-08'
---

# Talent Engineer at People Culture Talent

- **Company:** People Culture Talent
- **Location:** United States
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-08-13
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/people-culture-talent/7973c633-6c08-48d9-84b9-d9cf2b5b1a36

## Job description

## THE ROLE

We're looking for a Talent Engineer — a senior, principal level individual contributor who owns the entire recruiting cycle and client relationship: strategy, execution, and everything in between.

You're not a sourcer who occasionally gets client-facing, and you're not a recruiter who hands off the hard problems. You're the person a founder trusts to design the hiring plan, write the job description that attracts the right person, provides strong judgement and education to run a real process, and then go find and close the right candidates.

This role exists for someone who thinks like an operator. You're equally comfortable in a strategy conversation with a CTO but also building innovative sourcing lists late at night because you’ve uncovered a unique angle. You build and use AI tools, not as a novelty but as leverage, so you can move faster and smarter than recruiters running a manual process.

Note: This role is fully remote, but will require on average 4-5 hours of overlap a day within the 9-6pm PT timezone due to client, team, and candidate overlap.

## WHAT YOU’LL OWN

- Client Partnership & Strategy
- Take full ownership of the client relationship from start to finish — you are the face of PCT for your accounts, not just a name on a status update.
- Collaborate with founders and leaders to design hiring plans, moving beyond simply following their instructions (we are strategic partners, not task takers).
- Guide founders and first-time hiring managers on building a high-signal interview process, and coach interview teams to execute it effectively.
- Provide market intelligence and competitive context to every client conversation - comp, talent availability, hiring trends
- Search Execution
- Run full-cycle searches across Engineering and adjacent technical functions (Product, Design, Data, Security) — sourcing, screening, and closing
- Source and identify hard-to-find technical talent using Ashby, Gem, Juicebox, Pin, and other AI-native tools — the finding is still yours, not something you hand off
- Assess senior and staff+ candidates with the judgment to know what separates good from truly exceptional
- Build pipelines that go beyond inbound and referrals. Creative, non-obvious sourcing strategies are your default, not your exception
- Building & Optimization
- Treat your workflow as something to be engineered, not just executed. Develop the tools, prompts, sequences, and automations that make your searches faster and more effective.
- Use AI tools like Claude to work smarter, whether it's synthesizing research, drafting outreach, or analyzing your pipeline.
- Conduct structured A/B tests on outreach messaging, sourcing channels, and process design, and use the results to inform and improve your approach.
- Share your innovations — when you create a better way to do something, it becomes the standard for how PCT operates.
- Data & Judgment
- Track pipeline health, pass-through rates, and search progress, using this data to drive decisions with clients—not just to report on them.
- Recognize when to rely on the data and when to trust pattern recognition built from experience

## WHAT YOU’LL BRING

- Track Record: You have independently managed full-cycle technical searches and quickly earned the trust of a CTO or VP of Engineering within your first few conversations. You take ownership of outcomes, not just activities.
- Range: You are comfortable handling all aspects of the job—sourcing, screening, client strategy, job description writing, and interview design—and you see these as interconnected rather than separate roles.
- Builder's Mindset: You have built or significantly improved a workflow, tool, or process, and you find real satisfaction in automating what was once manual work.
- AI Fluency: You use Claude or comparable tools daily as working partners for research, drafting, and analysis, and you are genuinely excited by the potential of agentic and API-driven tools in recruiting—not just aware they exist.
- Creative Problem Solving: When common sourcing channels or messaging approaches don’t work, you don’t wait for direction—you proactively test alternative solutions.
- Judgment: You can clearly articulate what distinguishes a strong candidate from an exceptional one, and you trust your judgment enough to confidently push back on clients when necessary.
- Communication: You are able to write a job description, brief a founder, coach a hiring manager, and craft outreach that gets responses—communicating clearly and independently at every step.
- Autonomy: You manage your own schedule, handle multiple client relationships and searches at once, and make sound decisions without waiting for approval.

## THIS ROLE PROBABLY ISN'T FOR YOU IF

- You want to focus solely on either sourcing or client strategy—this role requires both, always.
- You require a fixed playbook and structure to feel confident.
- Your experience with AI tools is limited to ChatGPT, or you haven't built anything truly useful with AI.
- You require significant ramp-up time before operating independently with senior stakeholders.
- You're seeking a people management track right now, rather than delving deeply as an IC.
- You approach things with a fixed playbook and aren't excited to think from first principles.

## CONTRACT TERMS

This is a contract-to-hire position with strong potential for permanent conversion based on performance and business needs. PCT believes in growing with talented people who are committed to building exceptional teams. Competitive compensation provided with placement-based bonuses.

## About People Culture Talent

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: People Culture Talent (PCT) partners with venture-backed startups to build exceptional teams through embedded talent search, people operations, and culture‑building services.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Bootstrapped)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2018
- **Founders**: Tianna Johnson and Caitlin Cooke

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Human Resources / Talent & People Operations
- **Target customers**: Venture‑backed technology startups at all stages (seed to pre‑IPO), venture capital firms, and high‑growth companies.
- **Mission**: “To build better founders and companies by creating the people, culture, and talent foundations that generational companies are made of.”

## Products & Services
PCT offers a full suite of services organized around three pillars:
- **Talent** – Retained and embedded executive search, recruiting process design, talent strategy, ATS implementation (Ashby partner), candidate experience design, and recruiting metrics.
- **Culture** – Values definition and operationalization, workplace culture development, mission/vision/framework creation, retreat/offsite planning, and employer branding.
- **People** – Organizational design & headcount planning, performance management systems, leveling & career architecture, total rewards, benefits strategy, onboarding/offboarding, payroll & HRIS implementation, manager enablement, and fractional services (marketing, customer support, L&D, Chief of Staff).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not publicly available (private, no disclosed funding).
- **Key Metric**: 220 total employees (as of early 2025); companies they have scaled average 300% annual growth.
- **Notable Investors / Partners**: Not an investment‑backed firm; clients and partners include Andreessen Horowitz (where co‑founder Caitlin Cooke advised portfolio companies), Ashby (premier implementation partner), Rippling, Lattice, Leapsome, Gem, Juicebox.
- **Growth Signals**: 5 offices globally (San Francisco, plus remote hubs across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Philippines). Currently hiring engineers (Founding Engineer, Product Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer) indicating a push to build internal platform tools. Have scaled a single client from 10 to 800 team members.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Embedded operating model** – PCT works inside the client’s tools (Slack, ATS, etc.), providing full transparency and real‑time collaboration, unlike traditional agencies.
- **Boutique by design** – The firm intentionally stays small and flat, with senior operators directly managing every engagement. No handoffs to junior consultants.
- **Proven pattern recognition** – Founders have personally scaled engineering and talent teams at Lyft (400→7,000 for IPO), GitHub (through Microsoft acquisition), Notion (20→600, $500M→$10B valuation), and ID.me (100→1,500).
- **Full‑lifecycle offering** – Covers everything from first hire to pre‑IPO people infrastructure, making it a one‑stop partner for founders.

## Strategic Focus
- Deepen the “platform” side of the business by building internal software and systems (ATS implementations, people analytics, automation).
- Expand fractional services across more functions (marketing, customer support, L&D, Chief of Staff).
- Maintain a people‑first, high‑trust culture that mirrors what they advise clients to build.
- Continue serving the venture‑backed ecosystem, from early‑stage founders to later‑stage transformations.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Described as a team of seasoned operators who are “unapologetically embedded” and committed to honest counsel. Values include accountability, collaboration, and continuous learning.
- **Work style**: Hybrid environment with a mix of remote and on‑site work. Offices in San Francisco and remote hubs across multiple countries. Some roles are fully remote, others require in‑office presence (SF).
- **Team**: Small (220 employees) but expanding; direct access to founders and partners. Engineers and non‑engineering roles alike work on high‑impact projects for top VC‑backed startups.
- **Perks**: Not publicly detailed; typical benefits for a Bay Area talent firm likely include competitive compensation, flexibility, and the opportunity to shape the people‑tech ecosystem.

## Sources
1. [People.Culture.Talent. – Homepage](https://www.peopleculturetalent.com/)
2. [Who We Are – People Culture Talent](https://www.peopleculturetalent.com/who-we-are)
3. [What We Do – People Culture Talent](https://www.peopleculturetalent.com/what-we-do)
4. [Built In – People Culture Talent Profile](https://builtin.com/company/people-culture-talent)
5. [People Culture Talent – Careers Page (Ashby)](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/people-culture-talent)

## Other roles at People Culture Talent

- [PCT | Technical Sourcer](https://feeny.ai/job/pct-technical-sourcer-people-culture-talent-united-states-3asakrgq1hpr) — United States
- [PCT | Talent Partner](https://feeny.ai/job/pct-talent-partner-people-culture-talent-united-states-ft5963cq699p) — United States
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