What does an AI recruitment agency do that a generalist recruiter does not?

It finds people who are not looking. A generalist works from CVs and job boards, which see the minority of AI researchers and engineers who are on the market. Founding Hires works from the published literature and from public code, reads what each person has built, and approaches them about their work, months before a job board would show them.

How much does Founding Hires charge?

A success fee, owed only on a signed offer. There is no retainer and nothing is billed while the search runs. The share, the rebate period and the exclusivity terms are agreed in writing before the intake call.

How long does a search take?

A first shortlist within seven days of the intake call, with the reasoning attached. The time to a signed offer then depends on the candidate's window: a researcher finishing a doctorate in September is reachable from January and decided by May, and the agency plans the search around that calendar rather than against it.

Can we search the index ourselves instead of using the agency?

Yes. The same index is open to clients directly, for $179 a month or 149 € in the euro area, with search by subject and alerts that fire when someone new matches or a defence moves closer. Companies that hire often take a seat on the index; companies that need one hard hire hand the search to the agency. Both start from the same data.

AI recruitment agency

The recruitment agency for AI researchers and AI engineers.

Founding Hires is an AI recruiting agency for AI researchers, applied AI engineers and AI engineers, paid on success. Every search starts from our own index of 1 048 947 researchers on 561 727 AI papers, which dates the end of 20 298 doctorates, so we reach people months before they come on the market. Most of the people we introduce were not job hunting, and in many cases nobody had approached them yet.

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Success fee No retainer, you pay on a signed offer

AI roles only AI researchers, applied AI engineers, AI engineers

1 048 947 researchers In the index every search starts from

7 days Typical time to a first short list

Why teams call an AI recruitment agency

Timing is most of the job.

The researchers and engineers worth hiring are reachable for a short window: the months around finishing a PhD, wrapping up a project, or watching a lab reorganise around them. Miss it and they are inside a frontier lab on a package you cannot match. A generalist recruiter works from CVs and job boards, which see the minority who are on the market. We spend our time working out when that window opens, for everyone else.

We read the work

Every search starts in the literature and on GitHub. We look at what someone has published and shipped, which tells us more in ten minutes than a CV does in a week, and it means we can talk to them about their work rather than about a job spec.

We get there early

Our index dates the end of a doctorate from public records, so we know who comes free next spring while other agencies wait for a profile to change. Earlier conversations, less competition on the offer, and candidates considering one role seriously instead of five at once.

We say no a lot

Short lists here are short. If we cannot find the right people for a brief, we tell you early and stop billing your attention, and sometimes we will tell you the role as written is the reason the search is stalling.

Source: the Founding Hires index of the AI research literature.
What the index holds	Count
Papers indexed	561 727
Researchers on those papers	1 048 947
Profiles enriched from OpenAlex, ORCID and DBLP	1 040 229
Profiles with a classified research area	996 673

Updated 2026-10-26

The AI roles we recruit for

Six very different jobs that all say AI on the tin.

An AI researcher and an inference infrastructure engineer share an acronym and not much else. They read different signals, care about different things and need a different pitch, so the agency runs each of these as its own search.

AI researchers

Research scientists pushing on pre training, post training, alignment, evaluation or reasoning, with the publication record to back it up. Found in the published record, months before the doctorate ends.

PhD or equivalent Publications Frontier labs

Applied AI engineers

The bridge profile, often a researcher who moved into industry. They turn a promising idea into training runs that finish, experiments that reproduce and code other people can use.

PyTorch Distributed CUDA

AI engineers

Engineers who get models in front of users and keep them there: agents, retrieval, tool use, evals, and the cost and latency work nobody demos. Found through public code and the middle of author lists.

Agents Evals Product sense

ML and inference infrastructure

The people who own the GPUs, the serving stack and the throughput numbers, and who keep an inference bill from quietly eating your runway.

Serving GPU fleet Reliability

Founding and early engineers

Broad builders for AI native startups, comfortable when the spec does not exist yet and happy to own something end to end.

0 to 1 Full stack Ambiguity

Heads of AI and CTOs

Leaders who can set an AI roadmap, hire the team that delivers it, and stay close enough to the work that good engineers respect them.

Leadership Roadmap Hands on

You pay us when someone signs. Until then the risk of the search sits with us, which is the arrangement that keeps everyone honest about whether the role is real.

Success based fee, no retainer, terms agreed before we start

Before you call

Common questions

What companies ask an AI recruitment agency before signing, answered the way we answer them on the first call. For a comparison with other firms, read the best AI recruitment agencies, compared.

What does an AI recruitment agency do that a generalist recruiter does not?: It finds people who are not looking. A generalist works from CVs and job boards, which see the minority of AI researchers and engineers who are on the market. Founding Hires works from the published literature and from public code, reads what each person has built, and approaches them about their work, months before a job board would show them.
How much does Founding Hires charge?: A success fee, owed only on a signed offer. There is no retainer and nothing is billed while the search runs. The share, the rebate period and the exclusivity terms are agreed in writing before the intake call.
How long does a search take?: A first shortlist within seven days of the intake call, with the reasoning attached. The time to a signed offer then depends on the candidate's window: a researcher finishing a doctorate in September is reachable from January and decided by May, and the agency plans the search around that calendar rather than against it.
Can we search the index ourselves instead of using the agency?: Yes. The same index is open to clients directly, for $179 a month or 149 € in the euro area, with search by subject and alerts that fire when someone new matches or a defence moves closer. Companies that hire often take a seat on the index; companies that need one hard hire hand the search to the agency. Both start from the same data.

Contact

Let's talk.

Tell us what you are building and who you are missing. The fastest way is a thirty minute call. The form works too: if we think we can find that person we will say so within a day, and if we cannot we will say that too.

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