Senior Recruiter

About the role

We are hiring a Senior Recruiter to own research and scientific recruiting across some of Merge’s most impactful roles. This is a full-cycle recruiting role for someone who enjoys hard searches, ambiguous technical domains, passive candidate sourcing, and close partnership with research leaders.

This role is ideal for a recruiter who has hired for specialized technical or scientific teams and wants to operate close to the research frontier. You do not need to be a neuroscientist or ML researcher, but you should be intellectually curious, rigorous, and comfortable learning enough of a domain to recruit credibly.

In this role, you will:

• Own full-cycle recruiting for research and scientific roles across bioengineering, neuro, ML, engineering, and adjacent technical areas.
• Partner with hiring managers to define role scope, must-have criteria, interview plans, and candidate evaluation rubrics.
• Build targeted sourcing strategies for passive candidates across companies, labs, universities, publications, conferences, and research networks.
• Create and maintain talent maps for priority domains, including candidate archetypes, companies/labs of interest, and outreach narratives.
• Screen candidates for motivation, trajectory, technical relevance, communication, and fit with Merge’s stage and mission.
• Drive a structured and high-signal hiring process, including interview coordination, feedback loops, scorecard quality, and closing strategy.
• Represent Merge’s mission with depth, clarity, and honesty to candidates considering academia, large labs, startups, or other frontier opportunities.
• Use data to diagnose bottlenecks, improve hiring manager alignment, and increase search quality and velocity.
• Help build the recruiting infrastructure of an early talent function: templates, process, reporting, candidate experience norms, and operating cadence.

Requirements

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• Experience owning multiple challenging pipelines end-to-end, including meaningful ownership of technical, scientific, research, or highly specialized roles.
• A track record of sourcing and closing passive candidates in competitive talent markets.
• Strong hiring manager partnership: you can clarify ambiguous needs, push for prioritization, and keep teams aligned.
• Deep expertise in at least one relevant scientific or technical domain and comfort learning unfamiliar technical domains and translating them into search strategy.
• Excellent candidate communication, especially with senior, skeptical, and highly sought-after candidates.
• Strong process discipline: clean pipelines, clear follow-up, structured notes, and data-informed prioritization.
• High integrity and sound judgment when representing candidates, compensation, timelines, and company stage.
• Excitement about building recruiting systems in a small, high-ownership team.