Founding Technical Recruiter

Preference Model

Preference Model

People & HR, IT

San Francisco, CA, USA

Posted on Apr 27, 2026

Location

San Francisco

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

On-site

Department

Operations

About Us

Preference Model is building the next generation of training data to power the future of AI. Today's models are powerful but fail to reach their potential across diverse use cases because so many of the tasks that we want to use these models are out of distribution. Preference Model creates RL environments where models encounter research and engineering problems, iterate, and learn from realistic feedback loops.

Our founding team has previous experience on Anthropic’s data team building data infrastructure, tokenizers, and datasets behind the Claude. We are partnering with leading AI labs to push AI closer to achieving its transformative potential. We are backed by a16z.

About the Role

As a founding technical recruiter, you will:

  • Source creatively and relentlessly: dig through repos, papers, Hacker News threads, Discord servers, academic labs, open-source projects, and your own network to find candidates nobody else is talking to

  • Evaluate technical talent directly: read code, parse research papers, and understand architecture decisions.

  • Move fast with zero drops: every candidate gets a response, every process moves forward, no one slips through the cracks.

About You

You may be a good fit if you:

  • Are obsessively detail-oriented. You love clean pipelines and accurate data

  • Are personable and a great communicator

  • Are scrappy and resourceful

  • You work well in a lean team

  • Have 2+ years of experience in technical recruiting

Nice-to-haves

We prefer candidates with experience in:

  • Hiring for frontier AI roles: ML researchers, infra engineers, systems engineers, or similar deeply technical positions

  • Founder experience or being the first recruiting hire at a startup

  • A strong existing network in AI/ML engineering

We value diverse perspectives and experiences. If you're excited about this role but don't check every box, we still encourage you to apply.

We are backed by a Tier 1 VC. We offer competitive base salary as well as generous equity (>90th percentile).