Talent Lead in London

The Company Atomionics builds quantum sensors and AI that see through the Earth. Our technology replaces decades of guesswork in resource exploration with weeks of high-accuracy insight, helping the world find the critical minerals it needs for the energy transition. We're backed by BHP Ventures, In-Q-Tel, Wavemaker, and others who bet early on paradigm shifts, and we're scaling operations across Singapore, Australia, and North America. This is deep tech at its most tangible: physics that goes into the field, onto moving vehicles and drones, and solves billion-dollar problems underground.

We're hiring a Talent Lead to find and close the people who will define Atomionics' next phase. This isn't a "manage the recruiting team and run the pipeline" role. We already have a team who owns inbound and coordination. What we need is a hunter: someone who can personally find and close the talent that doesn't exist in normal pools.

The people we want to hire—quantum physicists, precision mechanical engineers from defence contractors, geophysics PhDs, AI researchers from frontier labs—aren't on LinkedIn. They don't need a job. They're heads-down at organisations that pay well and where they have credibility. Convincing them to leave for a Singapore deep-tech startup takes more than a polished outreach email. It takes understanding what motivates them, finding them where they actually are, and building a mission and equity narrative that holds up under scrutiny.

What You Will Do

• Hunt, don't process. You'll personally run sourcing for hyper-niche searches: Boolean, Google Scholar, citation chains, conference attendee lists, referral chains. This is hands-on individual contributor work. The volume is low; the depth is everything.
• Map the landscape. For every senior hire, you'll figure out where the right people actually work, including in research groups, national labs, defence contractors, and second- or third-tier companies adjacent to the obvious targets. The best mechanical engineer for us isn't necessarily at SpaceX.
• Sell the mission, not the salary. You'll be the person who has that conversation with a candidate earning materially more than we can offer in cash and makes it land. The narrative you'll use is built in close partnership with the Chief of Staff. Your job is to know it deeply enough to make it feel real, especially when it comes to equity with candidates for whom ESOPs are unfamiliar territory.
• Get close enough to the work to be credible. You'll partner with founders and technical leads to understand each role deeply enough to engage a candidate the way another scientist or engineer would. You won't be the technical interviewer, but you'll be the first technical feeling conversation they have with us.
• Build sourcing infrastructure for the long term. University relationships, communities, employer-brand initiatives. You'll work hand-in-hand with the marketing team—at Atomionics, hiring and brand are the same conversation.
• Shape how we hire globally. As Atomionics expands into Australia, India, and the US, you'll build the talent strategy for each market, mapping where the right people are, how they need to be approached differently, and what the Atomionics pitch looks like in each context.

What We're Looking For

Must Have

• A track record of personally hunting and closing hyper-niche technical talent. Boutique executive search, in-house recruiting at a frontier deep-tech/defence/national lab/research organisation, or similar. Resume-volume and LinkedIn-driven recruiting isn't the profile.
• An individual contributor at heart. You may have led teams in the past, but you still get satisfaction from running a search yourself and personally closing a hard hire.
• The ability to talk credibly to a quantum physicist or an INS engineer—not because you are one, but because you've done the homework to be taken seriously by one.
• Experience closing candidates on mission, autonomy, and equity rather than cash. You understand the conversation that needs to happen with someone earning materially more than your offer.
• Comfort operating with minimal infrastructure, a small budget, and ambiguity. You don't need a playbook.
• Taste. You can tell the difference between a strong resume and an exceptional person.

Good to Have

• Direct experience hiring in quantum, photonics, geophysics, AI/ML research, or precision instrumentation.
• Familiarity with research-driven sourcing tools—Google Scholar, citation graphs, academic conference circuits.
• Experience structuring offers in international contexts, particularly across Asia, Australia, and the US.
• Prior work at a Series A or B startup where the recruiting function was being built from scratch rather than maintained.

Who Thrives Here

This role suits someone who has spent years getting good at finding people other recruiters couldn't, and is now looking for a small, high-stakes environment where every hire matters. The volume is low. The bar is unforgiving. There's no team to manage and no playbook to follow—just a list of brilliant people in odd corners of the world, and the question of how you're going to convince them to come build something that hasn't existed before.

If you read the brief above and your first instinct was to think about specific people you've already met who might fit, we would like to hear from you.