Recruiting & People Operations

The role

We're looking for a strong operator to own all of Recruiting and People operations. Somone who can bring structure, organization, and a great candidate experience to a fast-moving hiring team. This is a high-impact, cross-functional role where you'll work closely with recruiting, hiring managers, and candidates to keep the process running smoothly from first conversation through offer. You'll own interview coordination, candidate communication, and recruiting/people operations while helping build the systems and processes that enable Applied Compute to hire exceptional people at scale.

What you'll do

Own the candidate experience

• Coordinate interviews and manage candidate communication from first touch point through offer

• Serve as a thoughtful, responsive point of contact for candidates throughout the process

• Ensure every candidate has a seamless, high-touch onsite experience with Applied Compute

Build and improve recruiting operations

• Manage Ashby and continue to build scalable processes, systems, and workflows as our hiring needs grow

• Identify opportunities to make recruiting more efficient and improve the candidate experience (improve shadowing systems, prep materials, etc.)

• Support recruiting initiatives across employer branding, events, onboarding, and team operations

Build and improve people operations

• Assist with HRIS implementation and manage a scaling EOR

• Manage our onboarding process and continuously improve employee benefits

What we're looking for

• Experience in recruiting coordination, people operations, executive assistance, or a similar role, ideally in a fast-paced startup environment

• Exceptional organizational skills and attention to detail. You can manage multiple moving pieces while ensuring nothing falls through the cracks

• Strong communication skills and a high level of professionalism. You're thoughtful and responsive with candidates, hiring managers, and teammates

• Systems thinking. You naturally look for ways to streamline recruiting processes and build repeatable systems as the team grows

• High ownership. You can take a process or project from idea to execution and proactively identify ways to make it better

• Candidate-first mindset. You care deeply about creating a thoughtful, high-touch experience throughout the recruiting process

• Excited about an in-person culture (5 days in SF)

STRONG CANDIDATES ALSO HAVE

• Experience building recruiting processes or infrastructure from zero to one

• A track record of creating exceptional candidate experiences in fast-moving, high-growth environments

• Strong instincts for process improvement and the ability to turn ambiguity into scalable recruiting systems

• Interest in owning people operations

The U.S. base salary range for this full-time position is $100,000–$130,000. Total compensation for this role also includes meaningful equity in a fast-growing startup, along with a comprehensive benefits package designed to support you both personally and professionally. Base salary is determined by a range of factors including individual qualifications, experience, skills, interview performance, market data, and work location. The listed salary range is intended as a guideline and may be adjusted.

About us

Applied Compute builds Specific Intelligence for the enterprise. We provide the continual learning infrastructure for companies to build agent workforces trained on proprietary data and institutional expertise. Our researchers and platform embed directly within customer environments to build custom evals, train models, and deploy agents that get better with use.

• Why we’re excited: We get to work at a rare intersection. Our product team builds the platform powering a new generation of digital coworkers. Our research team pushes the frontier of post-training and reinforcement learning. Our applied AI team sits side-by-side with customers as they ship agents into production. This combination of strong product, deep research, and boots on the ground is what we believe it takes to bring AI to the enterprise. We are product-led, research-enabled, and forward-deployed.

• Who we are: We’re a team of engineers, researchers, and operators. Many of us are former founders. We've built RL infrastructure at OpenAI, data foundations at Scale AI, and systems at Together, Two Sigma, Watershed, and others. We work with F50 customers and are fortunate to be backed by partners like Kleiner Perkins, Benchmark, Sequoia, Lux, and Greenoaks.

• Who Thrives Here: We're looking for people who are excited about applying novel research and complex systems to real-world problems. Our team genuinely enjoys working with customers: listening, empathizing, and understanding how work actually gets done in their organizations. Former founders, people who've built a lot of side projects, or anyone who's shown they can own something end-to-end, tend to do well here.

Benefits & Logistics

This role is based in San Francisco. We work from our office in the Mission. We offer:

• Competitive compensation and equity

• 100% employer-paid health insurance coverage for you and your family

• Unlimited PTO

• Paid parental leave

• Daily lunches and dinners

• Transportation and relocation support

• 5% 401k match

We sponsor visas. While we can't guarantee success for every candidate or role, if you're the right fit, we're committed to working through the process with you. We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. As set forth in Applied Compute’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.