Paraform | The #1 Agentic Hiring Platform & Recruiter Marketplace. Backed by Felicis.
About the role
We have 20 engineers and more than $100M in ARR, and we're scaling the engineering team roughly 3x over the next year. The AI Platform team is where our data advantage becomes product: it owns the matching, ranking, and agentic systems that decide which recruiter sees which role, which candidate reaches which company, and how much of the hiring process runs without a human touching it.
What they're looking for
- Staff-level IC depth in ML or applied AI: you're the person others pull in when the problem is genuinely hard, and you've stayed technical while leading
- 1+ years managing or formally tech-leading engineers (Tech Lead Manager) or 4+ years including setting technical direction across multiple teams (Technical Director)
- You've shipped production ML or LLM systems used by real people at scale: retrieval, ranking, recommendation, agentic workflows, or similar
- Eval-driven: you know how to measure model quality against business outcomes, not just offline benchmarks, and you can tell a real win from noise
- Data-fluent: you can pull your own SQL, sanity-check an experiment readout, and push back on a bad metric
- AI fluency is a floor here, not a differentiator. You use AI tools in your own work and you know how to raise a team's leverage with them
More about this role
We have 20 engineers and more than $100M in ARR, and we're scaling the engineering team roughly 3x over the next year. The AI Platform team is where our data advantage becomes product: it owns the matching, ranking, and agentic systems that decide which recruiter sees which role, which candidate reaches which company, and how much of the hiring process runs without a human touching it.
We're hiring a technical leader to own the AI Platform engineering team. This is a TLM role: you'll manage a pod of Applied AI, ML, and Product engineers while staying deep in the core ML work yourself, from data and model design to the hardest ranking and matching problems. You'll partner closely with product and data science and be accountable for outcomes, not output: match quality, automation rate, and the hiring velocity our systems create for customers. Title (Tech Lead Manager, Technical Director, or Engineering Manager) depends on your experience; the ownership doesn't.
Expect to spend at least a third of your time building, more in the early days. You'll read PRs, review evals, and ship production code yourself, every week, not occasionally. The management load grows as the team does, but...
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