Head of Talent

About Plato

Plato is an applied research lab building the environments used to train specialized AI agents. We turn proprietary real-world data into high-fidelity simulations that produce the dense reinforcement learning signal required to train frontier models.

Compute and baseline architectures are rapidly commoditizing; environment design and RL data are the true bottlenecks. Today, models don't fail from a lack of compute. They fail because bad task design, leaky reward functions, and brittle verifiers train them to cheat instead of learn. Plato exists to make RL signal provable, grounded, and robust at scale.

We're based in San Francisco and backed by leading investors and researchers across top frontier labs.

Why Apply

Own the Highest-Leverage Function: Everything Plato ships is downstream of who we hire. You will own the input that determines the output of the entire company.

Build It From Zero: There is no existing recruiting machine to inherit or maintain. You will build the candidate pipeline, design the interview loops and scorecards, and set the bar itself.

Hire for Frontier Work: You'll be selling a genuinely hard technical mission to researchers, infrastructure engineers, and domain experts who have their pick of frontier labs.

A Seat at the Table: You'll work directly with the founders on headcount planning, org design, and the values that hiring decisions are measured against.

The Role

A research lab is the sum of the people in it. At our stage, a single hire moves the company more than a quarter of roadmap, and a single bad hire costs more than an empty seat.

As Head of Talent, you own hiring across all of Plato: research, engineering, operations, and go-to-market. That means more than filling requisitions. It means building the candidate pipeline that every future hire comes through, and turning what we believe about the work into a repeatable, honest process that selects for it. Sourcing strategies that reach people who aren't looking, interview loops that actually predict performance, and a bar that holds when we are under pressure to grow fast.

You will be the person who makes sure Plato scales without diluting what makes it work.

What You'll Do

Own Hiring Company-Wide: Run hiring end to end across every function, partnering with hiring managers on role definition, headcount planning, and prioritization, and owning the outcome for each search.

Translate Vision and Values into a Hiring Bar: Turn Plato's mission and operating principles into concrete, testable signals (competencies, scorecards, and calibration) so that "culture fit" means something specific and defensible rather than a gut call.

Build the Candidate Pipeline: Own top of funnel end to end. Build durable inbound and outbound pipelines, run outbound sourcing motions and referral programs, cultivate agency and community partnerships, and keep a warm bench of qualified candidates ahead of open roles rather than starting each search from zero.

Design and Run Interview Processes: Architect the interview loops for each function, including structured stages, work samples, debriefs, and decision rules. Train interviewers and hold the process consistent as the team grows.

Own the Recruiting Stack and Its Data: Run Ashby as the system of record. Instrument the pipeline, report on conversion, time-to-hire, source quality, and offer-accept rates, and use the numbers to fix what's leaking.

Close Candidates: Own the candidate experience end to end and personally drive offers and closes against competing frontier-lab offers.

Build the Talent Function: Start as a hands-on individual contributor and grow the function, adding coordinators, sourcers, and recruiters as volume demands it.

Required Qualifications

Full-Cycle Recruiting Depth: 5+ years in recruiting with meaningful in-house experience at a high-growth startup, owning searches end to end rather than handing them off.

Zero-to-One Process Building: You have built a candidate pipeline and a hiring process from scratch rather than inheriting and maintaining one. You can point to the sourcing motions, interview loops, and scorecards you designed and explain why they were built that way.

Technical Credibility: You can hold a substantive conversation with research and infrastructure engineers about what they work on, and evaluate a technical resume without a manager translating it for you.

Judgment and a Held Bar: You are comfortable being the person who says no when a hiring manager is desperate to fill a seat, and you can explain the decision in terms of signal rather than feel.

Closing Ability: A track record of closing senior candidates against competing offers from strong companies.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience hiring research, ML, or infrastructure talent at an AI lab or deep-tech company.

Experience scaling a team from roughly ten people to fifty, including the process changes that transition requires.

Hands-on ownership of a modern recruiting stack (Ashby, Paraform, or similar) and comfort working from pipeline data.

Experience partnering with founders on org design and headcount planning, not just requisition execution.