“Great vision without great people is irrelevant.”
Jim Collins
We have the roles. We need the people.
Big Wave Digital has more open roles than hours in the day. Our clients are venture-backed AI and technology companies in San Francisco, New York and Boston, and they keep handing us searches. The roles are signed, briefed and waiting. What we need is one more person who loves the hunt: someone who can find the right people, pick up the phone, and work out quickly whether a candidate is the real thing.
That is this role, and it is pure sourcing. No sales. No business development. No calling companies to win work, and no client management. You find and qualify candidates; I look after the clients, the platforms and every submission.
I’m Keiran Hathorn, founder of Big Wave Digital. I’ve worked in tech recruitment since 1998 and have run this agency since 2010. We are a small, senior desk, which means you would work directly with me every week, with no layers of management in between.
What you’ll do
Each week I’ll hand you a short list of priority roles with a clear brief: the must-haves, the scorecard the client is hiring against, the salary range and the location. From there, the search is yours.
- Headhunt. Search LinkedIn and well beyond it for people who match the brief, including the ones who aren’t looking.
- Call. Speak with candidates by phone or video. This is a phone-first role, because one real conversation tells us more than twenty messages.
- Qualify. Test each person against the role’s criteria: depth of experience, motivation, salary expectations, location, work authorisation and availability.
- Verify. Confirm people are who they say they are. Fake resumes and manufactured LinkedIn profiles are everywhere in US tech hiring right now, and an experienced eye is the best defence.
- Summarise. Send me a short written summary of every qualified candidate: who they are, why they fit, what they want, and anything that gives you pause. I take it from there.
Quality matters far more than volume here. Three well-qualified people a week are worth more to me than a long list of maybes.
The roles you’d source for
The mix changes week to week, but this is a fair picture of the desk right now.
Engineering and AI
- Senior and Staff Software Engineers (Python, TypeScript, Node; backend and full-stack)
- Founding Engineers at seed and Series A AI companies
- AI and ML Engineers, including LLM agents, evaluation and agent harness work
- Research Scientists in AI safety and alignment
- Computer vision and video analytics engineers
- Forward Deployed Engineers
Strategy, operations and go-to-market
- Chief of Staff and Founding Chief of Staff
- Deployment Strategists and Forward Deployed Strategists
- Strategy and Operations Leads, often with a McKinsey, Bain or BCG background
- Founding Go-to-Market Leads and Business Leads
- Heads of Operations and Operations Managers
- Product Managers, Product Leads and UX/UI Designers
Most of these roles sit in San Francisco, New York or Boston, some on-site and some remote across the US and Canada. They are senior, well-paid positions with fast-growing companies, many with equity attached, so the candidates worth calling are usually busy, employed and selective. Finding them and earning ten minutes of their attention is the craft.
What you’ll bring
- At least 2 years of experience sourcing or recruiting for technology roles. You have probably worked in-house at a tech business, at a tech recruitment agency, or both. Either way, you need to know your game.
- Confidence on the phone. You enjoy calling people you have never met and you know how to open a conversation with someone who wasn’t expecting it.
- Fluency in the language of tech. You can tell a backend engineer from an ML engineer, you know what FAANG-calibre experience looks like on a resume, and you understand why a former consultant suits a Chief of Staff seat.
- A sharp eye for authenticity. You read the resume first, cross-check it against LinkedIn, and notice when the story doesn’t hold together.
- Clear, concise writing. Your candidate summaries are short, specific and useful.
- Independence. You manage your own hours, keep your commitments and say so early when a search is proving difficult.
- A base in the USA, with availability during US business hours for candidate calls.
Experience sourcing for AI startups, or approaching candidates from top-tier consulting firms, is a real advantage.
How it works
- Hours. Part-time to begin: 10 to 20 hours a week, shaped around your schedule. If it works well for both of us, the role grows from there.
- Location. Fully remote, anywhere in the USA.
- Pay. An hourly rate for the hours you work, with a placement bonus on top whenever a candidate you sourced is hired.
- Tools. We provide a LinkedIn job slot and a Big Wave Digital email address, so you represent the agency from day one. You don’t need a LinkedIn Recruiter licence of your own.
- Support. A proper brief on every role, quick answers when you need them, and honest feedback on every candidate you send through.
You would work closely with me, and we’d settle on a regular rhythm for handovers and catch-ups.
The role would suit an experienced recruiter who wants serious, interesting work without a full-time load, or an independent sourcer looking for a steady anchor client.
Why this role
Most recruitment jobs ask you to do everything at once: win the client, write the advert, find the candidate, manage the offer and chase the invoice. This one asks for the part many recruiters enjoy most. There are no sales targets, no cold calls to hiring managers and no client politics. The roles already exist, and there are plenty of them. Your whole week goes into finding good people and talking with them.
You would also be learning the US AI market from the inside: which companies are hiring, what they pay, what they screen for and why. After nearly thirty years in this industry I’m happy to share everything I know along the way.
How to apply
Apply through this advert with your resume, and add a few lines on the kinds of roles you have sourced for and a hard-to-find candidate you once tracked down. I read every application myself.
