Instrumental builds the manufacturing acceleration platform behind the world’s most complex electronics. We capture digital exhaust and engineering context from assembly lines—images, test logs, BOM data, performance, repair cycles—and our AI engines identify insights that are difficult or impossible for human engineers to find. We accelerate the companies building the AI era by improving manufacturing yield, throughput, and ramp. NVIDIA, Meta, L3Harris, and their manufacturing partners rely on Instrumental to accelerate new product introduction and production.
We're entering one of the most important periods in our company's history. Over the next year, we'll be building the team that defines Instrumental's next chapter.
We're looking for a recruiter who is energized by difficult searches, relentless about finding exceptional people, and believes that talent is a company's greatest competitive advantage. This isn't a recruiting role where you'll inherit a finished playbook. You'll partner directly with founders, executives, and hiring managers to shape how we hire—not just who we hire. You'll also influence recruiting strategy, improve our hiring process, and help build a recruiting function that scales alongside the company.
What You’ll Be Doing:
- Build exceptional teams: Own full-cycle recruiting for technical and business roles, from sourcing through offer acceptance.
- Solve difficult hiring challenges: When searches become difficult, you don't keep doing the same thing—you rethink the strategy. You experiment, challenge assumptions, and find creative ways to uncover talent others miss.
- Raise the hiring bar: Partner with hiring managers to define what excellence looks like, improve interview processes, and ensure we're consistently making outstanding hiring decisions.
- Influence the business: You'll advise leaders on talent strategy, market dynamics, and hiring decisions. We value recruiters who are willing to challenge assumptions when they believe there's a better path.
- Help build the recruiting function: Whether it's improving our interview process, creating better sourcing strategies, leveraging AI, or providing an authentic candidate experience, you'll leave the recruiting organization better than you found it.
This role probably isn't the right fit if...
- You prefer well-defined recruiting processes over building and improving them + maintaining a recruiting engine more than creating one.
- When a search gets difficult, you tend to wait for direction rather than rapidly iterating on new approaches
- You only know how to recruit for established brands where candidates come to you. Much of our work involves proactively finding and engaging exceptional talent.
- You're satisfied with making a hire. We care just as much about making the right hire.
- You tend to shy away from feedback, experimentation, and continuously raising your own recruiting bar.
Requirements:
- 3+ years of experience as a full-cycle technical recruiter at a fast-growing company (<100 people) as an early recruiting team member
- Demonstrated success recruiting for difficult-to-fill engineering or technical roles.
- Strong sourcing skills and experience engaging passive candidates.
- Track record of influencing hiring managers and improving hiring outcomes.
We’re a growing team that works collaboratively, supports each other, and is highly energized by the opportunity to make a large impact. We actively promote an inclusive environment, valuing passion and the ability to learn. You’re encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn’t precisely match the job description!
The following is a representative annual base salary range for this position within the Bay Area: $110,000-$220,000. Job level and salary opportunities are evaluated through our interview process – we review the experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities of each applicant.
Instrumental is proud to offer a highly-rated variety of benefits, including health, vision, dental, commuter plans, and parental leave. All candidates must have an unrestricted right to work in the U.S.
At Instrumental, protecting company and customer information is a shared responsibility. Employees are expected to handle sensitive employee, financial, and company information in accordance with company security, confidentiality, and privacy policies, and promptly report suspected security incidents or policy violations.