Role description
Recruiter
TenexAbout Tenex
The Fortune 500 is rebuilding itself right now. Every company over a billion in revenue is asking the same question: what does it mean to run this business if AI does half the work in five years? Most don't know how to answer. That's why they call us.
Tenex is the partner ambitious companies hire when the stakes are too high to get AI wrong. We embed elite teams directly into their operations, find the bets that actually move the business, and ship the work that makes them AI-native. The clients are sharp. The problems are unforgiving. The work has to land.
We get to do this work alongside the people building the frontier. Anthropic and OpenAI are formal partners, and we sit in the room with their Applied AI teams on real client problems. Vercel, Lovable, and a growing list of the most important companies in AI are partners too. We were the partner Anthropic named on the Claude for Small Business launch, delivering AI fluency training across various US cities, and workflows we built ship inside Claude for Small Business today.
The bar for joining is high. We hire people with high agency and high urgency, who care less about where they trained and more about what they've built. If you want to spend the next chapter of your career building the team that decides where Fortune 500 companies go next, alongside the best operators in the industry and the labs building the technology, this is the place.
About the Role
Everything we sell is people. The elite teams we embed into client operations are only as good as the talent we put in the room, which means recruiting isn't a support function here. It's how the business is built.
That's what Recruiters at Tenex are hired to own. This is a craft role, and a lean one. We run recruiting with a small team, which means you own your searches full cycle, from the first outbound note to the signed offer, for the AI Strategists, Forward-Deployed Engineers, and operators who go straight into our toughest client work. There's no large team to hand work off to. You're the first person a candidate meets and the one accountable for whether they're sharp enough to clear our bar.
You won't work off a req list. We expect you to take ambiguous, high-level direction from a hiring manager and turn it into a sharp, targeted search, knowing exactly who you want before the role even opens. You'll hold strong opinions on talent, defend them with evidence, and push back when the bar is at risk. Searches are owned, not handed off, so context never gets lost between stages.
Two roles make up most of your pipeline: Forward-Deployed Engineers and AI Strategists. Those are the searches you'll run again and again, with the occasional ad hoc role mixed in as the business needs it. Going deep on these two profiles, knowing exactly what great looks like and where to find it, is most of the job.
We don't recruit the way most firms do. We expect you to live in the modern agentic AI stack as a daily practitioner, using it at every stage from sourcing to screening to closing, compressing a search that used to take a month into something faster. You're a sourcer at heart who doesn't wait for inbound.
The goal is simple to state and hard to hit: the people you place should raise the bar of the firm, measured by the quality of who joins and how fast we close the searches that matter. Nothing else really counts.
This role will report to our operations leader and partners closely with hiring managers across Strategy and Engineering. Plan on being in the office five days a week with the rest of the team.
What You'll Do
Own full-cycle recruiting for our two core searches, Forward-Deployed Engineers and AI Strategists, plus ad hoc roles as they come up, from first touch to signed offer
Partner closely with hiring managers to understand each role deeply, then translate abstract asks into concrete target lists, calibration, and a close plan
Build deeply targeted sourcing strategies. Know the companies, the teams, and the individual people worth pursuing before a search opens
Run candidate process with urgency and care. Same-day follow-up, next steps booked before you hang up, no candidate left chasing us
Use the agentic AI stack hands-on across sourcing, screening, and closing, and push the team on where to automate next
Manage pipeline data with integrity and bring evidence to calibration conversations. Spot funnel problems early instead of relying on gut
Drive offers end to end, including extending, negotiating, and closing
Protect the bar. You're the filter that keeps high-agency, high-urgency people moving forward and everyone else out
Lead the work that raises how recruiting operates here: interview loops, scorecards, interviewer training, and the playbooks the rest of the talent team runs on the next search
What You'll Bring
5+ years of full-cycle recruiting or sourcing experience at a high-growth technology company or startup
A track record hiring for genuinely hard roles. You can hold a credible conversation with a hiring manager about the work, not just the title, and walk through exactly who you placed and why they cleared the bar
Daily, hands-on use of the modern agentic AI stack across every stage of the funnel (Claude, Cowork, ChatGPT, and whatever ships next week). You don't just know these tools, you recruit with them, and you're a sourcer at heart who doesn't wait for inbound
A strong storyteller in writing and conversation who follows up without being chased
Comfortable influencing at every level of an organization, anchored on data rather than gut
Operationally sharp and detail-oriented. You build systems, keep a clean pipeline, and create structure when the path isn't fully drawn yet
Genuine care for the candidate experience. How someone is treated through the process is as much a reflection of Tenex as the offer itself
High ownership, low ego, and a builder's instinct
Bonus Points
Background recruiting technical or strategy talent at an AI-forward company, a fast-growth startup, or a top search firm
Experience standing up recruiting process and tooling from scratch as a team scaled
Why Tenex
You get to build the team that does the work, not as a back-office function but as the thing the whole business depends on. You'll recruit the people who sit in the room with Anthropic and OpenAI's Applied AI teams, for clients whose AI bets will define the next decade of their industry. The work is real, the consequences are real, and the team you do it with is the kind of group you don't get to assemble twice in a career.
Compensation
OTE is $105,000 to $160,000, depending on experience. Recruiters will earn a performance-based discretionary bonus tied to hiring outcomes and contributions to the function. Compensation may also include equity and other long-term incentives.
Benefits
Comprehensive medical (PPO and HSA options), dental, and vision
HSA, Healthcare FSA, and Commuter Benefits
100% employer-paid life insurance + AD&D
100% employer-paid long-term disability insurance
Responsible PTO. Take what you need.
Our Workplace
We work in person from our New York City office five days a week. The best ideas come from being in the same room. Faster collaboration, real-time problem solving, stronger relationships, sharper execution.