@ Architect
Company Overview • Architect is an AI research and product lab focused on chip design, aiming to compress the chip design timeline using AI. • The company operates on a B2B model, working with large fabulous chip companies, and has a mission to design chips specialized for clients' workloads.
Team Structure and Culture • Currently 12 team members, with a split between hardware, ML, and software, mainly based in Palo Alto, with some engineers in India. • Team works mostly six days a week from the office; a hybrid model might be available for senior roles.
Role Requirements • Looking for a founding recruiter to build a pipeline for future hires, focusing on ML research teams. • Role involves attending conferences, managing external agencies, and building in-house recruitment processes.
Ideal Candidate Profile • Preference for candidates with experience building ML research teams, attending conferences, and having a strong network in the ML field. • Open to candidates from various company sizes, ideally with 5-10 years of experience, who are social and can travel for conferences.
Compensation and Logistics • Salary range for the founding recruiter role is between $180k to $220k, with flexibility based on experience and market conditions. • Equity is offered competitively, and work primarily involves being onsite in Palo Alto with frequent travel for conferences.
Interview Process • Three-step process: initial call with Aaditya, followed by a take-home exercise, and an onsite interview with key team members. • Looking for creative and strategic thinkers who can demonstrate their sourcing and networking skills through the interview stages.
Timeline and Urgency • Immediate need to expand the ML research team and prepare for future hires post next funding round. • Submissions expected to start as early as next week, with an emphasis on quickly building a strong candidate pipeline.
Pain Points and Challenges • Need to establish a presence in scientific communities and conferences to attract top talent in the stealth mode. • Current challenge is the lack of information available to candidates due to the company's stealth status.
Why candidates should join About Architect Architect is a frontier AI lab for chip design. We build AI models and tools for on-demand custom ASICs at scale. Our goal is to co-design custom ASICs alongside evolving ML workloads, and enable a new era of domain-specific chips that unlock capabilities impossible with current hardware paradigms. Born out of Stanford Research, our team blends AI with Silicon with a founding team from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta SuperIntelligence, xAI, Apple and Intel.
Founding Recruiter role with competitive comp plus meaningful equity. You'll build the entire talent pipeline from scratch and work directly with founders in Palo Alto. Ideal candidates Upload a candidate's resume here to see how well they fit the requirements.
Seniority
5 - 10 years of experience recruiting for ML research or engineering teams.
Work experience
Experience recruiting for ML research or engineering teams. Updated
Experience building recruiting processes from scratch at a startup. Updated
Previously a founding recruiter who grew into a Head of Talent. Updated
Hard skills
Proven ability to source and engage passive, top- tier candidates. Updated
Technical fluency in modern ML concepts (LLMs, NLP, etc. ). Updated
Soft skills
Highly social, able to build relationships at conferences. Updated
Miscellaneous
Must work from the Palo Alto office 5 days per week Updated
Willing to travel for conferences roughly once a month. Updated
Traits to avoid
Candidates who have only recruited for general software engineers. Updated
Recruiters who have not been hands- on for several years. Updated
About Architect Architect is a frontier AI lab for chip design. We build AI models and tools for on-demand custom ASICs at scale. Our goal is to co-design custom ASICs alongside evolving ML workloads, and enable a new era of domain-specific chips that unlock capabilities impossible with current hardware paradigms. Born out of Stanford Research, our team blends AI with Silicon with a founding team from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta SuperIntelligence, xAI, Apple and Intel.
What You'll Do As the Founding Recruiter at Architect, you'll build the recruiting function from the ground up and own the entire hiring pipeline end-to-end — from sourcing to close. You'll be embedded in the technical community, attending conferences like NeurIPS, DAC, ISSCC, and Hot Chips to identify and build relationships with world-class talent before they ever hit the market. You'll partner directly with the founders to define hiring strategy, build sourcing playbooks for deeply specialized roles across hardware and AI, and close candidates against offers from top labs and big tech. This is not a coordination role, you'll be a hands-on, full-cycle recruiter who can credibly engage with research engineers, chip architects, and ML researchers, understand what they work on, and sell them on the mission. You'll shape the team that shapes the company.
What We'd Like to See • Experience: 4+ years of full-cycle technical recruiting, with a strong track record closing hardware engineers (RTL, DV, physical design, chip architecture, compilers) and/or ML/AI research engineers. • Technical Fluency: Ability to have substantive conversations with candidates about their work — you know how to screen researchers and engineers. • Sourcing: Expert-level sourcing skills. You don't wait for inbound — you mine conference proceedings, GitHub, Google Scholar, LinkedIn, and niche communities to build pipelines for roles that most recruiters can't fill. • Community Presence: Willingness and ability to represent Architect at top-tier conferences (NeurIPS, DAC, ISSCC, Hot Chips, MICRO, ISCA) and research meetups. You build real relationships, not just collect badges. • Closing Ability: Proven experience closing candidates in competitive markets against FAANG, top AI labs, and well-funded startups. You understand equity, comp structuring, and how to sell a early-stage opportunity. • Startup DNA: You've recruited at an early-stage company before (or desperately want to). You're comfortable building processes from scratch, operating without an ATS on day one, and wearing multiple hats. Bonus: • Previous recruiting experience in the semiconductor or AI industry. • Existing network in the chip design or ML research communities. • Experience recruiting for hardware-software co-design, compilers, or systems roles. • Background in technical roles before moving into recruiting. What We Offer • Competitive salary and equity • Fast-paced startup with autonomy and visible impact • Cutting-edge AI-driven chip design challenges What to ask candidates • Are you able to work from our Palo Alto office five days per week? • Describe a time you sourced and hired a top-tier ML researcher or engineer who wasn't actively looking. What unconventional methods did you use? • This role requires frequent travel, about once a month, for conferences in places like San Diego, Boston, and Toronto. How do you feel about that level of travel? • Can the candidate be on-site? If not, is the candidate willing to relocate? • What is their salary expectation? • How actively are they recruiting?
Role details
Salary $180K - $220K
Equity Competitive equity
Visa sponsorship not available
On-site work policy 5 days in-office in Palo Alto, CA
Full-time position
Hiring Count Looking to hire 1 candidate for this role
Location Palo Alto, CA
Candidate questions View 6 questions to ask candidates
Ideal companies Here are a list of companies Architect likes to see candidates with past work experience from. You can also use these companies and adjacent companies as a place to start sourcing candidates. Frontier AI Research Labs
Hot Chips 2025 Companies  Condor Computing Corporation  Rapidus  Marvell Technology
Lightmatter  Amdocs  IBM  Intel Corporation  Meta  Broadcom Show all 19 companies Frontier Lab, Dev Tools/Agents startup  Google DeepMind  Marco Polo  OpenAI  Meta  Windsurf  CogX Festival  Mercor  Anthropic  Anysphere
Target Schools  Georgia Institute of Technology  Massachusetts Institute of Technology  Tsinghua University  UC Berkeley Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences (EECS)  Stanford University  Carnegie Mellon University  Princeton University  Harvard University  Caltech Show all 10 companies Primary Targets (Chip + AI):  Intel Corporation  Marvell Technology  Rebellion Industries  SambaNova  Cadence  Samsung Electronics  Edge Delta  Google  NVIDIA Show all 13 companies Large Tech Companies with Strong ML Research Teams
Deep Tech & AI-focused Startups (ML/Robotics/Self-Driving)
Rejected candidates feedback • Increase focus on candidates with direct experience building ML research teams—avoid those with general tech or product recruiting backgrounds. • Prioritize sourcing experts with proven technical fluency in nuanced ML/hardware research topics and deep academic networks (conference attendance, publication tracking). • Ensure candidates demonstrate creative, hands-on sourcing strategies tailored to highly specialized, passive ML and chip research talent.