Talent Engineer

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. - Creat…