Head of Talent Engineering

Alpaca Health

• $120K — $180K *
Business Services
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of talent acquisition or recruiting experience
  • Strong understanding of AI and automation in recruitment
  • Proven experience building scalable recruiting systems
  • Exceptional relationship-building and closing skills
  • Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment

Responsibilities

  • Design and implement Alpaca's comprehensive talent acquisition infrastructure
  • Recruit exceptional talent across various functions and levels
  • Develop innovative sourcing strategies to identify top candidates early
  • Engineer continuously improving recruiting workflows and processes
  • Enhance the company's talent brand through engaging storytelling and community outreach

Benefits

  • Meaningful equity stake
  • Comprehensive health benefits package
  • Flexible paid time off (PTO)
  • Dinner provided for late work hours
  • Opportunity to work with a high-performing team in NYC
Full Job Description
Role: Head of Talent Engineering

We believe recruiting is an engineering problem.

The best companies don't simply hire great people. They build systems that consistently discover, attract, evaluate, and close exceptional talent before everyone else.

As our Head of Talent Engineering, you'll build that system.

You'll combine recruiting, automation, AI, software, content, operations, and storytelling to create one of the highest-performing talent engines in startups.

You'll recruit incredible people yourself, but just as importantly, you'll design the machine that makes exceptional hiring inevitable.

The people you hire and the systems you build will directly determine Alpaca's trajectory.

đźš§ What You'll Own
Build Alpaca's Talent Engine

Design the infrastructure that powers hiring across the company.

This includes:
  • AI-powered sourcing systems
  • Recruiting automations and workflows
  • Candidate research pipelines
  • Outreach engines
  • Interview infrastructure
  • Recruiting analytics
  • Talent CRM
  • Hiring dashboards
  • Internal recruiting tools

You'll constantly ask:

"How can software replace manual recruiting work?"
Recruit Exceptional People

Own executive and critical hiring across engineering, product, GTM, operations, clinical leadership, and emerging functions.

You'll partner directly with founders to define roles, build candidate pipelines, run interview processes, and close world-class talent.

We care far more about talent density than hiring volume.
Build Proprietary Sourcing Advantages

The best candidates rarely apply.

Develop creative ways to identify talent before anyone else through:
  • AI research
  • Outbound sourcing
  • Community building
  • Referral networks
  • Events
  • Content
  • University partnerships
  • Open-source contributions
  • Founder networks
  • Custom datasets

You enjoy solving the puzzle:

"Where are the exceptional people nobody else is talking to?"
Engineer Recruiting Workflows

Recruiting should improve every month.

Design systems that continuously increase speed, quality, and leverage.

Examples include:
  • AI sourcing agents
  • Automated candidate enrichment
  • Personalized outreach generation
  • Scheduling automation
  • Candidate scoring
  • Interview calibration
  • Offer workflows
  • Recruiting dashboards
  • Knowledge management

You think like an operator and build like an engineer.
Raise the Hiring Bar

Partner closely with hiring managers to define excellence.

Improve interview quality.

Design better work samples.

Challenge assumptions.

Continuously improve how we evaluate talent.

The goal isn't simply filling positions.

It's building one of the strongest teams in healthcare.
Build Alpaca's Talent Brand

Exceptional recruiting begins long before the first outreach.

Help establish Alpaca as one of the most exciting places to build a career through:
  • Founder content
  • Engineering content
  • Recruiting campaigns
  • Events
  • Community engagement
  • Candidate experience
  • Employer branding

Great recruiting is exceptional storytelling.
Build the Recruiting Organization

As Alpaca grows, you'll define how recruiting scales.

You'll determine:
  • Which roles to hire internally
  • Which work should be automated
  • Where specialized recruiters make sense
  • How AI changes recruiting
  • How to maintain hiring quality at scale


Who You Are
You're obsessed with exceptional talent

You believe that a handful of extraordinary people can change the trajectory of an entire company.

You'd rather leave a role open than lower the hiring bar.
You think in systems

You naturally look for leverage.

Whenever you perform repetitive work, your instinct is to automate it.

You enjoy building processes that become competitive advantages.
You're AI-native

You actively use AI throughout your workflow.

Research.

Sourcing.

Outreach.

Scheduling.

Evaluation.

Automation.

Prompting.

Agentic workflows.

You aren't experimenting with AI.

You already work differently because of it.
You're both technical and people-oriented

You love software, but recruiting is ultimately about people.

You can move seamlessly between building workflows and building relationships.
You're entrepreneurial

You thrive in ambiguity.

Nobody needs to tell you what to build next.

You identify bottlenecks, design solutions, and execute quickly.

Building from zero energizes you.
You're an exceptional closer

Great recruiting isn't convincing people.

It's helping exceptional people make exceptional decisions.

You build trust, understand motivations, navigate objections, and communicate opportunity with conviction.
You have high standards and high intensity

Building a generational company requires exceptional people.

You're energized by ambitious goals, move with urgency, and care deeply about quality.

You believe recruiting is one of the highest-leverage functions inside a startup.

Why Join

This is a rare opportunity to define how a company hires from its earliest days.

You'll build a recruiting function powered by AI from the ground up, partner directly with the founders on every strategic hire, and shape the culture, velocity, and trajectory of the business.

If you enjoy building systems that compound, experimenting with new technology, and helping exceptional people find meaningful work, you'll have enormous ownership here.
Compensation & Benefits
  • Competitive salary
  • Meaningful equity
  • Comprehensive health benefits
  • Flexible PTO
  • Dinner when working late
  • Work alongside an ambitious, high-performing team in NYC

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