Senior Recruiter

ABOUT THE TEAM

To empower Anduril's Talent Acquisition team, hiring managers, and interviewers with the essential knowledge, skills, and resources needed to consistently attract, assess, and hire top-tier talent. This role is critical for driving measurable improvements in recruiting effectiveness, hiring quality, and overall efficiency across the entire hiring lifecycle.

ABOUT THE JOB

We are looking for a Senior Recruiter to join our rapidly growing team in Costa Mesa, CA, Seattle, WA, Boston, MA or Washington, DC. In this role, you will be responsible for owning the Recruiting for Recruiting function.

As a Senior Recruiter on our Talent Acquisition team, you are the person who builds the team that builds the teams. Your mission is to own the end-to-end hiring process for our recruiting organization itself — sourcing, assessing, and closing the Recruiters and Recruiting Coordinators who will become the backbone of our hiring engine across every division.

This is a uniquely meta role: you need to be an exceptional recruiter to credibly evaluate other recruiters. You will know what great looks like because you live it every day — from sourcing strategy to candidate experience to close. You will be the quality bar for the people who set the quality bar for the rest of the company.

You will operate within our matrixed model, aligned to a Business Line Lead for day-to-day priorities and business context while reporting to a Functional Manager who will guide your long-term skill development and career growth. This structure ensures you are solving our most pressing TA hiring challenges while continuing to sharpen your craft as a senior member of the recruiting function.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

End-to-End Hiring Execution

• Own the full recruiting lifecycle (with sourcing support) for Recruiter and Recruiting Coordinator roles across divisions — from sourcing and screening through offer negotiation and close — ensuring a world-class candidate experience that reflects the standard we expect our hires to deliver.
• Develop and execute creative sourcing strategies to build robust pipelines for TA talent, recognizing that the best recruiters are rarely active applicants and require differentiated outreach, not just InMail volume.
• Manage the interview process end-to-end: conduct in-depth screens that assess recruiting craft (not just career narrative), prepare candidates and interviewers, and facilitate calibrated debriefs that separate strong operators from strong interviewees.
• Assess candidates against our competency framework — evaluating not just what they’ve done, but how they think about sourcing, stakeholder management, data, and candidate experience at a level that matches or exceeds our bar.

Embedded Business Partnership

• Partner closely with TA leadership and hiring managers across divisions to understand current and future recruiting capacity needs, team composition gaps, and the specific recruiting profiles that will succeed in each business context.
• Act as a talent advisor for TA hiring, using market data on recruiter compensation, availability by specialization (technical, G&A, cleared, etc.), and competitive intelligence to shape job descriptions, calibrate expectations, and influence headcount planning.
• Provide transparent, regular updates on pipeline health, search progress, and market conditions to your stakeholders — particularly when the news requires recalibrating timelines or expectations.
• Advise on role design and leveling for TA positions, helping hiring managers distinguish between an IC3 and IC4 recruiter profile, or when a Recruiting Coordinator role should be scoped as a sourcer hybrid.

Functional Craft & Collaboration

• Contribute to the TA Center of Excellence by sharing market intelligence on recruiting talent trends, compensation benchmarks, and sourcing strategies that work for hiring recruiters specifically.
• Mentor junior recruiters on the team — not just on process, but on the judgment calls that separate a good recruiter from a great one: when to push back on a hiring manager, how to read a passive candidate’s motivations, when to walk away from a search that’s mis-scoped.
• Partner with your Functional Manager to set development goals and grow your career toward Staff-level impact.
• Uphold data integrity in our ATS/CRM to ensure accurate reporting, capacity planning, and pipeline analytics for the TA function.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 5-8+ years of full-cycle recruiting experience in a fast-paced, high-growth environment.
• Direct experience recruiting recruiters, recruiting coordinators, sourcing specialists, or other TA/People Operations roles. You know where to find strong recruiting talent and how to assess craft, not just career narrative.
• Demonstrated ability to manage complex, senior-level searches and calibrate candidates against a competency-based framework — not just pattern-matching on resume keywords.
• Track record of mentoring junior team members on recruiting craft, interview technique, and stakeholder management.
• Strong stakeholder management skills with the ability to advise, push back on, and build trust with hiring managers across levels — including TA leaders who know the function as well as you do.
• A data-informed mindset: you track pipeline metrics, use conversion data to diagnose search health, and can present market intelligence to influence decisions.
• Ability to operate with a high sense of urgency and bias for action while maintaining quality and candidate experience.
• Strong communication skills, both written and verbal, with the ability to build rapport with candidates who are themselves expert communicators and relationship-builders.
• Must be a U.S. Person due to required access to U.S. export controlled information or facilities

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience recruiting in the defense, aerospace, or a related high-tech industry where cleared talent and mission-driven positioning are factors.
• Experience hiring for TA roles across multiple specializations (technical recruiting, G&A, executive, cleared, coordination/operations).
• Experience working in a matrixed or dual-reporting organizational structure.
• Demonstrated ability to improve TA hiring processes — interview design, assessment frameworks, onboarding — not just execute them.
• Familiarity with recruiting competency models and the ability to articulate what “great” looks like at each level of the TA career ladder.