Senior Technical Sourcer

Job description

We believe that the way people interact with their finances will drastically improve in the next few years. We’re dedicated to empowering this transformation by building the tools and experiences that thousands of developers use to create their own products. Plaid powers the tools millions of people rely on to live a healthier financial life. We work with thousands of companies like Venmo, SoFi, several of the Fortune 500, and many of the largest banks to make it easy for people to connect their financial accounts to the apps and services they want to use. Plaid’s network covers 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, UK and Europe. Founded in 2013, the company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Seattle, Washington D.C., Raleigh, London, and Amsterdam. Our EPD Recruiting team builds the teams that build Plaid. We partner with leaders across Engineering, Product, Design, Data, and Security to deliver thoughtful, candidate-first recruiting experiences that raise the bar for how we scale. We are responsible for delivering world-class technical talent through pragmatic, data-informed, and principle-aligned recruiting practices. We believe the hardest hires are won upstream, in the research and the reach-out, long before a loop is ever scheduled. Our goal is to help Plaid grow intentionally by hiring exceptional people who share our values and drive our mission to unlock financial freedom for everyone. We are hiring a Senior Technical Sourcer to build the pipelines behind Plaid's most difficult technical searches. You will own the top of the funnel across software engineering, infrastructure, data science, AI/ML, and security, from market research and pipeline strategy to qualified candidates entering the interview process. This role is for a deep researcher. Many of the people we need are not always findable by title alone, do not respond to templated outreach, and are not on any list you can buy. You will find them anyway, by mapping the market, reading the work, and writing outreach that earns a reply from someone who ignores twenty recruiter messages a week. You will carry a high req load across multiple technical domains at once, and you will do it without losing the details that make a pipeline trustworthy. You will also turn what you learn into intelligence the team can use: where the talent actually sits, what competitors are building and paying for, and what a role needs to look like to be winnable. This is a high-visibility seat. The quality of what enters our funnel shapes every hiring decision downstream. Responsibilities: - Own top-of-funnel strategy and execution for technical reqs across engineering, infrastructure, data, AI/ML, and security. You build the pipeline, engage and qualify the candidate, and hand off a qualified, well-briefed person to the recruiter. - Run deep talent research. Market maps, org mapping, competitor teardowns, conference and publication mining, open-source and technical community research, and advanced boolean and x-ray search across sources most people do not think to check. - Find niche and emerging technical talent where the qualified pool is small and almost entirely passive, including AI/ML, applied research, distributed systems, and security engineering. - Write outreach that gets answered. You personalize based on what someone has actually built, you test your messaging, and you own your response rate as a number you can explain. - Operate at volume without losing precision. You run multiple searches at once with disciplined follow-up cadences, accurate ATS hygiene, and clean data that others can trust. - Turn research into intelligence. Build market maps, talent density views, and competitive hiring insights, then bring them to recruiters and hiring managers to shape role scope, leveling, and search strategy. - Build diverse pipelines by design, through the breadth of your research and the inclusivity of your outreach, not as a screening step at the end. - Partner closely with recruiters and hiring managers on calibration. You bring the market back into the room when a role as written is not findable, and you propose what would make it winnable. - Track and report your funnel. Response rate, screen pass rate, and stage conversion tell you where to spend your next hour. Use them, and share what they say. - Represent Plaid authentically. You are often a candidate's first impression of us, and that first conversation sets the tone for everything after it. Qualifications: - 6+ years of technical sourcing/recruiting experience, including in-house sourcing at a high-growth technology company. - Mastery of sourcing research technique and tooling: boolean and x-ray search, LinkedIn Recruiter, GitHub and technical communities, publications and conference sources, and CRM or ATS sourcing workflows. You can find people who are not searchable by just title or company name. - Demonstrated success in