Senior Talent Partner

Our everyday digital experiences are in the middle of a realtime revolution: chatting alongside a livestream, getting realtime financial updates, or working with colleagues in a shared online space. Consumers now expect realtime as standard, and Ably powers a large part of it. We put developers first. Our products help teams build, extend, and deliver realtime digital experiences, delivering over 700 billion messages to more than 2 billion devices every month. Teams at HubSpot, Fin, Dialpad, NASCAR, Sportsbet, and General Motors all build on Ably. Working at Ably means helping build the infrastructure that will shape the next generation of the internet. More of what people do online is becoming live, shared and interactive, which only makes what we build more relevant and more necessary. AI is the latest place that shows up. There's still so much to build, and we'd like your help with it. About this role As the Senior Talent Partner at Ably, you'll be our sole in-house recruiter, reporting to our VP of People and owning hiring end-to-end, from calibrating the brief with the hiring manager through to signed offer. You’ll be responsible for everything that makes hiring work: how we interview, the tools we use, how we source, and how candidates experience Ably. There’s a good foundation in place, and you’ll decide what to sharpen first and have the autonomy and backing to do it. In a 60-person company, every hire changes the team, so this role exists to raise the bar: looking wider than the first good candidate, pushing back when a brief is off, making the case for waiting when the evidence isn't there, and judging your success by who is still thriving a year in, not how fast we filled the seat. Ably is an infrastructure company, and a large share of our team are deeply technical engineers. You'll run full-cycle recruiting across the company, but engineering is where the depth matters most. You'll understand what we build well enough to hold a credible conversation with distributed systems engineers, tell depth from polish, and explain why our problems are worth their time. You'll work closely with hiring managers, right up to our CTO. Day to day, you will • Calibrate hiring briefs before we go to market. Work with each hiring manager to turn complex technical requirements into a clear picture of who we need, and give honest feedback when the brief needs to change. • Find and close great people. Run outbound sourcing, screens and interviews, and close offers for engineering, GTM and other roles, supporting offers and compensation conversations alongside our People team. • Make our interviews better. Build on our structured interviews and scorecards so every process is fair, consistent and good at telling depth from polish. • Get more out of our tools, with AI at the centre. Make the most of Greenhouse and our hiring reporting, and put AI to work across sourcing, outreach, screening and admin so more of your time goes to the conversations that need a person. Use it as much as you can and show us what works. • Manage and negotiate our agency relationships. Decide where agencies add the most value, set the terms, and hold them to account. • Be Ably’s voice with candidates and the technical community. Shape our employer brand and candidate experience, and make sure new hires land well before they start. We'd love to hear from you if you have • A track record of finding and closing high-calibre engineers, ideally in infrastructure or distributed systems, and the technical grounding to earn engineers' respect. • Strong judgement when partnering with hiring managers: calibrating a brief, giving honest feedback, and running a structured, fair interview process. • Proven full-cycle recruiting experience, ideally as the sole o