Lead Recruiter at Inception – San Mateo, California

DescriptionInception creates the world’s fastest, most efficient AI models. Our Mercury model is the world’s fastest reasoning LLM and first commercially available diffusion LLM, delivering 5x greater speed and efficiency than today’s LLMs, with best-in-class quality.
We are the AI researchers and engineers behind such breakthrough AI technologies as diffusion models, flash attention, and DPO.
Reporting to Inception's leadership team, this role provides an opportunity to build the recruiting function for a company that's reshaping text generation. As our first recruiting hire, you'll attract exceptional talent across Research, Engineering, Product, and Go-to-Market functions and support rapid team growth.
You'll be building a talent pipeline in one of the most competitive hiring markets in tech; accordingly, this role requires someone with creativity, persistence, and deep technical credibility.
The ideal candidate is a data-driven, candidate-centric recruiter who has scaled recruiting functions from 0→1, built pipelines for highly technical roles, and sourced world-class researchers and engineers. They bring strong judgment in fast-changing environments, communicate effectively with executives and candidates, and can translate ambitious company goals into compelling talent narratives.
Key Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end recruiting lifecycle from sourcing through offer acceptance and onboarding
• Build and maintain a robust talent pipeline through creative sourcing strategies, including direct outreach, referrals, events, and partnerships with universities and research institutions
• Partner with founders to define talent strategy, identifying and prioritizing hiring needs across functions as the company scales
• Develop evaluation frameworks and interview processes that assess both technical excellence and cultural fit for our fast-paced research environment
• Establish recruiting operations, metrics, and best practices. Build scalable systems and processes as we grow from startup to scale-up.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of full-cycle recruiting experience, with significant focus on technical roles
• Track record of hiring for rapidly scaling startups or high-growth technology companies
• Experience recruiting for AI/ML research roles
• Comfortable engaging with highly technical candidates: able to discuss research, understand technical requirements, and assess talent in collaboration with engineering teams

Preferred Experience

• Background in scaling recruiting functions from early stage to growth phase
• Familiarity with applicant tracking systems and recruiting tools
• Deep network in the AI/ML community and understanding of the competitive landscape

Why Join Inception

• Pioneer a New Category: Build the recruiting function for a company defining the future of instant AI
• Work with World-Class Talent: Partner with the inventors of diffusion models and leading AI researchers to attract the next generation of AI talent
• Immediate Impact: Join at the ground floor where your contributions directly shape our team and growth strategy

Perks & Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity in a rapidly growing startup.
• Flexible vacation and paid time off (PTO).
• Health, dental, and vision insurance.
• A collaborative and inclusive culture

About UsInception creates the world’s fastest, most efficient AI models. Today’s autoregressive LLMs generate tokens sequentially, which makes them painfully slow and expensive. Inception’s diffusion-based LLMs (dLLMs) generate answers in parallel. They are 5x faster and more efficient, while delivering best-in-class quality.
Inception was co-founded by Stanford professor Stefano Ermon, who co-invented such breakthrough AI technologies as diffusion models, flash attention, and DPO, UCLA professor Aditya Grover, who co-invented node2vec, decision transformers, and d1 reasoning, and Cornell professor and Afresh co-founder Volodymyr Kuleshov, who co-invented MDLM and Block Diffusion.
We pioneered the application of diffusion to language, launching the world’s first commercially available dLLM, Mercury, in early 2025. We are currently deploying our large-scale diffusion LLMs at Fortune 500 companies. Diffusion is the technology behind today’s image and video AI, and we’re making it the standard for LLMs as well.
Our team includes engineers from Google DeepMind, Meta AI, Microsoft AI, and OpenAI. Based in Palo Alto, CA, we are backed by A-list venture capitalists, including Menlo Ventures, Mayfield, M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund), Snowflake Ventures, Databricks, and Innovation Endeavors, and by tech luminaries such as Andrew Ng, Andrej Karpathy, and Eric Schmidt.
If you are talented, innovative, and ambitious, come help us invent the future of AI.
We are an equal opportunity employer and encourage candidates of all backgrounds to apply.