Talent Acquisition Partner - AI Labs

Why This Role Exists

GrabOn is building an AI-native engineering lab. Not an innovation team stapled onto a coupon business a genuine product-engineering unit where every engineer ships with LLMs, agents, and retrieval systems as default building blocks. We're pre-IPO and moving fast.

The problem: the people who can build this don't respond to generic InMails. They're skeptical of AI in a job title. They need someone on the other end of the call who actually understands the difference between fine-tuning and RAG, knows why an engineer might prefer working with open-weight models, and can articulate what our AI Labs roadmap means for their career - not in HR-speak, but in builder-speak.

Our previous TA hires couldn't close. Not because the candidates weren't interested - because, our recruiters couldn't hold a technical conversation past the first two minutes. We need someone who can.

The Mission (Not a Task List)

You own the entire hiring funnel for AI Labs. That means:

HUNT

Find engineers, ML practitioners, and product builders who are actively shipping with Gen AI - not just listing it on LinkedIn. Source from GitHub repos, Kaggle, Discord communities, Hugging Face contributors, and open-source projects. If your sourcing strategy is LinkedIn Recruiter + Boolean strings, this isn't the role.

SELL THE VISION

Candidates will ask: Why would I join a coupon company to do AI You need to have an answer that makes them lean forward. You'll know our AI Labs roadmap cold - what we're building with agents, how we're rethinking search and personalization, why our data moat matters.

You're the first human touchpoint. If you can't generate excitement in 90 seconds, the candidate is gone.

SELECT WITH PRECISION

We'd rather leave a seat empty for 60 days than fill it with a mediocre hire. You'll use structured scorecards, Predictive Index behavioral assessments, and live technical-context interviews to separate signal from noise.

You'll flag cultural misalignment before we invest interview hours. Attention to detail isn't a nice-to-have - one wrong hire in a 15-person AI lab is catastrophic.

CLOSE

Manage offer negotiation, counter-offer scenarios, and notice-period navigation for Indian tech talent. Track every candidate in our ATS with obsessive detail. Your pipeline hygiene will be auditable at any point.

Who You Are (Read This Carefully)

This section is a filter. If fewer than 7 of these describe you, please don't apply.

1. You've personally used ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini to build something - a workflow, a prototype, a side project. You can talk about prompting strategies, token limits, and model selection trade-offs without Googling.
2. You've hired for technical roles at a startup or high-growth company (not a staffing agency). You know the difference between hiring for a 50-person startup vs. a 5,000-person enterprise.
3. You've closed candidates who had competing offers from product companies (not just service/consulting firms). You know how to sell equity story, learning velocity, and founder access as levers.
4. You can explain what a transformer architecture is, at a cocktail-party level. You don't need to implement one - but you need to know why it matters.
5. Your written communication is crisp. No typos in outreach. No generic templates. Every candidate message is personalized with something specific from their work.
6. You've used or are willing to master Predictive Index, and you understand behavioral assessments aren't horoscopes - they're data points in a hiring framework.
7. You have 2–5 years in talent acquisition. Not 0 -1 (too green for the autonomy required). Not 8+ (we need hunger, not process fatigue).
8. You're based in Hyderabad or willing to relocate. This role is in-office 4 days/week because recruiting for AI Labs requires proximity to the engineering team.
9. You've operated with a sourcing-to-close ratio and can tell us yours. If you've never tracked your own metrics, this isn't the right fit.
10. You think of recruiting as a sales function, not an admin function.

What You Won't Find Here

• A playbook. We're building the hiring process for AI Labs from scratch. You'll design it.
• A big team. It's you, a sourcing intern (eventually), and direct access to the CEO and engineering leads.
• Slow decision-making. Interviews happen in days, not weeks. Offers go out fast. You need to keep up.
• Traditional HR hierarchy. You report to the CEO. Not an HR manager, not a Head of People.

Compensation & Growth

• Base: ₹8–12 LPA (based on experience and demonstrated closing ability)
• Performance bonus tied to offer-acceptance rate and time-to-fill for AI Labs roles
• Direct mentorship from the CEO on business strategy and IPO-readiness hiring
• If you're exceptional: path to Head of Talent Acquisition within 18 months as we scale the team

You'll be the person who built the AI Labs team. That's a career-defining line on any resume.

Instead of a cover letter, answer the following questions (max 200 words total) in your application and email to [Confidential Information]:

1. Name one Gen AI tool you use daily and describe one non-obvious thing you've built or automated with it.
2. You're pitching a senior ML engineer at a Series D company to join GrabOn's AI Labs. They say: Why would I leave for a coupon site Write your 60-second response.
3. What's your sourcing-to-offer and offer-to-join ratio from your last 12 months

Applications without answers to the above will not be reviewed. No exceptions.