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Salary: USD 170,000 - 205,000 / annual
Foundry Robotics is building an AI-native robotics manufacturing company focused on deploying advanced assembly and production capability for leading robotics companies and national-security-critical hardware. The company is rebuilding American manufacturing as an AI-first, assembly-focused, dual-use contract manufacturer.
You will own end-to-end hiring for robotics and AI/ML research roles, including manipulation, perception, controls, learning, and ML infrastructure positions for both research scientists and research engineers. This is a specialized sourcing and recruiting function that requires deep technical knowledge and academic network expertise.
Key responsibilities include:
- Source candidates from academic literature (arXiv, CoRL, RSS, ICRA, NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR), author lists, acknowledgements, and citation graphs as your primary candidate database
- Build and maintain real relationships with university labs and faculty advisors who influence where their students land
- Leverage AI tooling for enrichment, paper-to-profile matching, and personalized outreach at scale while maintaining a human touch
- Develop competency maps for each role with hiring managers, decomposing positions into discrete, assessable skills
- Assign each interviewer exactly one competency to evaluate
- Build and run interviewer training and calibration for research hiring loops, including assessment of research taste and quality judgment
- Conduct talent competitor analysis against frontier labs, robotics startups, and autonomous vehicle companies
- Understand and articulate why researchers would choose Foundry over competitors with larger compute budgets or prestige
This is a 100% in-person role at the Emeryville, CA office. You will be the senior recruiting person for this function and will also personally conduct sourcing work. The company practices ethical hiring focused on long-horizon relationship building rather than pipeline throughput, and measures success on whether hires are still performing 12-18 months later.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 8+ years of technical recruiting experience, including real-time hiring of research scientists or research engineers in robotics, AI/ML, autonomy, or adjacent fields
- Demonstrated ability to read and understand research papers; researchers should not wince at your technical summaries
- Deep knowledge of the robotics and AI/ML landscape: labs, advisors, conferences, and how talent moves between them
- Proven track record building faculty and lab relationships that produced actual hires, not just campus visits
- Genuine AI efficiency: you have built or run tooling that multiplied your sourcing output and can walk through your technical stack
- Deep interest in the technology itself; this is not a role for someone seeking clean reqs and target close dates
- Demonstrated ability to build competency maps from scratch, not just fill in templates
NICE TO HAVE:
- Technical background (degree, research experience, or self-taught depth you can defend)
- Experience hiring into ITAR-controlled or cleared programs and familiarity with associated constraints
- Recruiting experience where research must survive contact with production systems
