Senior Technical Recruiter - Hardware

Founding Sr. Technical Recruiter

At Antares, our long-term mission is to make clean energy abundant from Earth to the Asteroid Belt. We're fueled by the belief that advanced nuclear energy can strengthen our military, solve the climate crisis, elevate global living standards, and expand humanity's presence in outer space. To achieve our mission, we're building mass-producible, inherently safe, deployable microreactors that can be used terrestrially, underwater, and in space.

Formed in 2023, the Antares team hails from SpaceX, The White House, MIT, Rigetti Computing, The Air Force, General Atomics, Relativity Space, Ursa Major, and National Laboratories like Los Alamos, Idaho, and Oak Ridge. Antares has raised over $130M in venture capital from top-tier investors and has over $13M in government funding.

Our People team is responsible for supporting Antares' best-in-class organization, as well as strategically managing our hiring pipelines to help us find the very best to join our company. On this team, you are given the opportunity to work across many disciplines in order to support the growth of our startup, while also helping to set the tone for Antares' company values and culture.

As our Founding Sr. Technical Recruiter, you'll spearhead the identification, engagement, and nurturing of top-tier technical talent for our priority positions. You will work closely with your teammates and company leadership to identify areas of improvement in the recruiting process, and will implement measures to drive innovation, efficiency, and standards of excellence within hiring practices. You will have an opportunity to recruit for a wide variety of deep-tech, operational, and leadership level disciplines, and will get to play a part in new initiatives in the future such as intern and university recruiting. The right person for this role will have a "no job too big or small" mentality, an unwaveringly positive attitude, a mission-driven mindset, a team-oriented attitude, and no ego.

Roles and Responsibilities:

• Lead kickoff meetings with Hiring Managers to develop requisitions, understand recruiting needs and discuss headcount while acting as a partner by providing insight and guidance into the entire interview/recruiting process
• Lead proactive sourcing efforts to identify, engage, and nurture passive technical talent for critical roles
• Act as a key liaison between talent acquisition and hiring teams, providing insights and recommendations on role profiles and market dynamics
• Provide a high-touch experience throughout the recruiting process with internal stakeholders and candidates while continuously keeping the pipeline active and supporting critical, hard-to-fill technical positions
• Develop a strong understanding of the mission while learning how to effectively pitch the team and opportunity, ultimately closing exceptional technical talent for the organization
• Build talent maps to generate market insights to inform your engagement strategy
• Collaborate with teammates on employer branding strategies and campaigns
• Analyze data, track metrics, and develop innovative ways to raise the bar on how to hire talent

Basic Qualifications:

• 5+ years of technical sourcing or full-cycle recruiting experience within aerospace or tech industries, with a proven track record of success in sourcing, closing, and placing candidates in technical roles
• In-depth understanding of technical skills, terminology, and industry trends, with the ability to provide strategic insights
• Strong competitive market awareness - knowing the hiring landscape in technical industries

Preferred Skills & Experience:

• Experience recruiting and sourcing for a startup or within niche hardware engineering roles
• Proven track record of hiring and scaling a team while maintaining a very high technical bar (Top 10% of talent)
• Able to operate in scrapy ways, without leaning on large teams or mature infrastructure while still producing results
• Comfortable interfacing directly with hiring managers and company leaders
• Able to manage multiple on-going projects and searches and flexible to changing priorities
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to effectively engage and influence candidates

Additional Requirements:

• Ability to work long hours and weekends as necessary to support critical milestones
• Ability to work onsite at our HQ in Torrance, CA

Location:

• We are located in Torrance, CA in a 322,000 square foot, brand new facility featuring large open spaces for team collaboration, R&D, and production, as well as easy access to the 405, 105, and 110 freeways. Our facility is in the heart of Los Angeles' vibrant emerging tech ecosystem alongside many other high growth startups and enterprises.

Culture:

At Antares, we like to specifically tie each role to our founding document's set of valueshere are the top five cultural values we think you should believe at your core to be successful:

• Think in Systems - Energy and Defense are complex ecosystems with numerous stakeholders with competing priorities, conflicting policies, perverse incentives, and emergent and path-dependent properties. First principles thinking alone is insufficient. Think probabilistically and then take action. "If you want to be certain, then you are apt to be obsolete." Over-optimizing the components often degrades the system
• Obsess over the End User - The customer and end user are often not the same. We will never build globally competitive commercial products if we lose sight of our end users and their entire interaction with the product life cycle
• Be Unconstrained by Convention - Our only limits are the laws of physics. Many, even experts, will say what we are working on is impossible. They said the same about SpaceX reusing rockets. Generationally impactful companies, by definition, must accomplish the seemingly impossible. If it were easy, it would have already been done. Never shy away from a solution because it has never been tried before, and never choose to do something because that's "how it's always been done"
• Go Where the Work Is - Never miss a chance to meet a customer, user, or stakeholder face to face, even if that means hopping on a plane. If you can't make it, find a teammate who can channel your intentions and go in your place. Deep work can be done from anywhere, but we believe teams are built in person, and aim to maximize our time together
• Operate in the Grey - Embrace nuance in pursuit of truth. Question every fundamental assumption

Equal Opportunity:

Antares is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Employment decisions are based solely on merit, competence, and qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability, or any other legally protected status.

ITAR Requirements:

To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (aka green card holder), (iii) Refugee under 8 U.S.C. 1157, or (iv) Asylee under 8 U.S.C. 1158, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here.