Founding Technical Recruiter
About the job
- At least 1 year of technical recruiting experience at a fast-growing technology company or a top recruiting agency.
- A strong grasp of technical skills, engineering roles, and how engineering organizations work.
- A proven ability to close offers and land senior- and staff-level engineers in competitive markets, with the ability to clearly explain how.
- Ability to work effectively with speed and ambiguity while adapting to shifting priorities, evolving roles, and changing hiring standards.
- Ability to operate autonomously as a team of one, make trade-offs independently, and iterate quickly.
- Comfort using artificial intelligence, automation, and new tools to improve sourcing, evaluation, and recruiting workflows.
- Build and own the AI-native recruiting agency.
- Work directly with the founders of Pensive and partner companies to define roles, source exceptional candidates, and close offers.
- Help hire and place engineers quickly while delivering a thoughtful, high-quality candidate experience.
- Shape recruiting strategy, processes, systems, and tooling as the company grows.
- Experience working at a recruiting agency.
- A Computer Science degree or prior software engineering experience.
- Experience with AI-native or agentic recruiting tools.
About the company
Pensive builds an AI-assisted grading and personalized learning platform for higher education. It helps instructors by automating grading, generating personalized feedback, creating rubrics, and learning the instructor’s grading style; it can grade handwritten STEM work and essays and provides a course-aligned AI tutor that answers questions 24/7 with citations from lecture notes, while integrating with LMS like Canvas, Blackboard, and Moodle. It differentiates itself by scaling individualized support for large classes through AI that mirrors a professor’s grading approach and feedback, backed by pilots at universities such as Harvard, UC Berkeley, and Columbia. Its goal is to cut educators’ grading time by up to about tenfold so they can focus more on teaching, mentorship, and research, while improving student outcomes.
Company Size
11-50
Company Stage
Seed
Total Funding
$6.9M
Headquarters
Palo Alto, California
Founded
2024
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Mayfield led the $6.8 million seed, with Sequoia, a16z, and prominent founders participating.
- Pensive opened to all instructors in February 2026, expanding beyond closed beta.
- Columbia’s math course used the tutor for tens of thousands of questions.
What critics are saying
- Instructure launched IgniteAI Agent in March 2026, bundling AI workflows inside Canvas.
- Universities banning automated grading after an error will crush trust and renewals quickly.
- If campus privacy teams reject student data sharing, Pensive loses its core product.
What makes Pensive unique
- Pensive grades handwritten STEM work and essays, then learns instructor preferences over time.
- In February 2026, Pensive processed 3 million questions across 1,000 instructors and 100+ schools.
- Its course-aligned tutor cites lecture notes and respects instructor AI policies.
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Benefits
- Remote Work Options