We pair 40 years of industrial experience from IFS with technical talent drawn from some of the best AI companies in the world. We measure ourselves in weeks, not months: our engineers spend time on customer sites, not just in front of a screen, and we expect the same grounded approach from every hire we make.

The Role

Nexus Black is scaling fast, and hiring is the constraint on almost everything else. We need someone who can build a talent function from the ground up: setting the strategy, doing the hands-on recruiting for our hardest technical and commercial roles, and building a small team to scale it. You will own hiring end to end, from AI Product, Engineering, Support, Adoption and Success through to the go-to-market talent who take our products to customers in vast array of industries we serve.

You will work closely with Nexus Black's leadership, including our CEO, on the roles that matter most. This is a build role, not a maintenance one: there is no existing playbook to inherit, and you will be trusted to write it.

What You'll Do

• Own the hiring strategy across Nexus Black and adjusting it as headcount plans change.
• Recruit hands-on for our hardest and most senior roles, including AI Product/Engineering, forward-deployed engineers, as well as sales, customer success and industry-expert hires.
• Build and lead a small talent team as headcount grows, setting the standards, tools and processes they'll work to.
• Source where the talent actually is: build direct outreach channels for technical talent, most of whom are passive and rarely browsing job boards, rather than relying on inbound alone.
• Design the assessment bar alongside hiring leads, building interview processes and technical assessments that predict on-the-job performance, for both engineering and commercial roles.
• Bring market intelligence on compensation, levelling and hiring trends across AI/ML and industrial software talent, keeping offers competitive without overpaying.
• Build the employer brand for Nexus Black in a crowded AI hiring market: what we build, who we build it with, and why the work is different from a typical AI lab.
• Protect the candidate experience throughout, from first outreach to signed offer, in a market where the best candidates have several live offers at once.

Qualifications

What You'll Bring

• Experience recruiting technical AI/ML talent (research engineers, applied scientists or ML engineers), with enough technical fluency to hold a credible conversation about model architectures, evaluation and production ML.
• Experience hiring go-to-market talent (sales, customer success, solutions) at a scaling technology company.
• A track record of building or significantly scaling a recruiting or talent function, not just working within one someone else designed.
• Fluency in compensation benchmarking and levelling across technical and commercial roles, and the judgment to know when to move fast on comp.
• Confidence managing senior stakeholders, including founders and executives, and the ability to push back on a hiring manager's brief when it won't find the right candidate.
• A direct, evidence-based approach: you'd rather show a hiring manager three strong candidates and the data behind them than promise a large pipeline.
• Comfort with a fast-moving, resource-constrained environment where you're building the plane while flying it.

Nice to Have

• In-house recruiting experience at an AI lab, AI-native start-up, or high-growth industrial software company.
• Experience hiring for vertical or industrial AI, rather than purely consumer or enterprise SaaS.
• An existing network across the UK and European AI and industrial software talent markets.
• Experience setting up an applicant tracking system, sourcing tooling, or interview training from scratch.

Additional Information

Why Nexus Black

We're a small team building AI that has to work the first time, because the people using it are forty feet up a utility pole or standing next to a production line. We challenge everything, including our own assumptions, and we'd rather be questioned than agreed with. If you want to build a talent function with real ownership, in a company solving problems most AI companies never see, we'd like to talk to you.