Principal Recruiter, Tech

Role Description

As a Principal Recruiter, you’ll play a pivotal role in building world-class technical and product teams for some of the fastest-growing tech companies.

• Embedded directly within a client, leading and accelerating US hiring for a VC-backed, hyper-growth technology company.
• Own all US hiring as the lead recruiter on the ground: around 30 roles, the majority technical, alongside senior leadership and executive searches.
• Bring time-to-hire down from over 100 days, lift offer acceptance, and build pipelines that do not depend on inbound sourcing.
• Build the US recruiting function from the ground: the process, the systems, the bar.
• Earn the leadership team's confidence in hiring back, returning the founders' time.

What You’ll Do

• Run full-cycle, sourcing-led recruiting and build the pipelines.
• Defend the bar with data and push back when a search is not scoped to win.
• Work directly with founders and the executive team.
• Bring an AI-native way of working: build and experiment with AI tools, design workflows that make recruiting faster, and teach others.
• Own the numbers that matter: pipeline velocity, offer acceptance, and time to hire, without dropping the quality bar.
• Lift the standard around you.

Qualifications

• Senior, principal, or founding-recruiter experience at a technology startup or scale-up in a genuine high-growth phase.
• Proven experience recruiting for Engineering, Data, or Product roles within tech scale-ups or high-growth environments.
• Strong understanding of technical hiring landscapes — from modern engineering stacks to data and product org design.
• Executive presence and resilience; ability to push back when a search is not scoped to win.
• AI fluency that goes beyond basic prompting; experience in building workflows, reports, or systems that change recruiting.
• A track record of building or improving a recruiting function or system.
• Comfort operating with autonomy and speed, making decisions in the moment when a hire is on the line.

Nice to have

• A technical educational background, such as computer science, for credible conversations with technical candidates.
• Experience with a modern ATS (Ashby a plus) and interview-intelligence tools such as Metaview.

This is probably not for you if

• You have spent your career inside large, process-driven organisations where the systems were built for you.
• This seat has no playbook waiting and no inbound to lean on; you will need to build it.