Lead Technical Recruiter - USA

About Inworld Inworld is a research lab of top researchers and engineers, building the world’s top-ranked realtime voice models. Today our models are the #1 ranked realtime voice models in the world. They are used to power the largest consumer-facing AI applications available, across categories like health, fitness, learning, therapy, companions, customer experience and media; representing 100s of millions of end users. Our work spans areas like research and development of state-of-the-art models, optimizing realtime inference, and creating best-in-class APIs and products that allow developers to engage their users. We’ve raised more than $125M from Lightspeed, Section 32, Kleiner Perkins, Microsoft’s M12 venture fund, Founders Fund, Meta and Stanford, among others. Our technology has powered experiences from companies such as NVIDIA, Microsoft Xbox, Niantic, Logitech Streamlabs, Wishroll, Little Umbrella and Bible Chat. We’ve also been recognized by CB Insights as one of the 100 most promising AI companies globally and have been named one of LinkedIn’s Top 10 Startups in the USA. We are looking for a Recruiting Lead to fuel our growth with extraordinary talent. This is a senior, high-ownership role: you'll act as a true talent partner to our founders and leadership across engineering, research, and business hiring as we scale. You'll own searches end to end, raise the bar on how we hire, and help shape the recruiting function itself. What you'll be doing - Own our most critical and senior searches end to end, operating as an executive search partner to our founders, from talent strategy and market mapping through offer and close - Act as a strategic advisor to hiring managers and leadership: shape role definitions, calibrate expectations, and design search strategies and execute them - Build deep pipelines of exceptional AI, engineering, research, and business talent through creative sourcing and long-term relationship building with passive candidates - Use data to drive decisions, track funnel health, diagnose bottlenecks, and report on hiring progress with rigor - Apply AI to recruiting: use assistants like Claude and AI-native sourcing and automation tools to automate workflows and build tooling that makes the whole team faster, while keeping candidate touchpoint personal and high-touch - Elevate our recruiting practice: improve processes, sharpen interviewer quality, ensure an exceptional candidate experience, and mentor others on the team - Represent Inworld in the market as a compelling, credible ambassador for our mission and culture What you'll bring - 8+ years of full-cycle technical recruiting experience, including several years supporting senior and hard-to-fill technical roles - Deep understanding of technical roles, experience hiring in AI/ML, infrastructure, or research environments strongly preferred - Versatility to run GTM, marketing, or business searches alongside your core technical focus - A track record of closing exceptional senior talent in highly competitive markets - Fluency with recruiting data, you use metrics to drive strategy, influence stakeholders, and hold searches accountable - A builder's mindset, you love creating tools, automation, and processes, you prototype fast and improve as you go - Hands-on fluency with AI assistants, you already use them daily, and you're always finding new ways to work smarter while maintaining a human-centered approach - Proficiency with a modern AI-native recruiting stack - Experience partnering directly with executives and hiring managers as a trusted advisor - Experience in retained executive search, or as a strategic search partner to founders and executives, is a strong plus You're a fit for our team if - You operate with high ownership, you don't wait for direction, you set it - You thrive in a fast-moving startup environment and stay effective amid ambiguity and shifting priorities - You love optimizing workflows and constantly look for ways to improve how…