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. Theres still so much to build and wed like your help with it.

About this role

As the Senior Talent Partner at Ably youll 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. Youll be responsible for everything that makes hiring work: how we interview the tools we use how we source and how candidates experience Ably. Theres a good foundation in place and youll 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 isnt 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. Youll run full-cycle recruiting across the company but engineering is where the depth matters most. Youll 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. Youll 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 Ablys voice with candidates and the technical community. Shape our employer brand and candidate experience and make sure new hires land well before they start.

Wed 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 or lead recruiter in a start-up or scale-up hiring across the UK and Europe.
• Hands-on outbound sourcing and market mapping with the numbers to show what works and a habit of using AI in how you work.
• Experience managing recruitment agencies including negotiating terms and holding them to account.

Bonus points if you have

• Experience hiring for developer tools AI or open source companies.
• A background in agency recruiting.
• Familiarity with Greenhouse ATS.
• An active presence in tech or recruiting communities online or in person and comfort being a public face for Ably.

Whats it like to work at Ably

Youll join a team of around 60 people working directly alongside senior engineering and leadership. No layers no bureaucracy and real ownership from day one.

Remote-first

We hire the best people wherever they are across the UK and Europe trust them to own their work and share decisions and feedback openly. Twice a year in February and August we all meet in person and we expect everyone to be there.

Remote-first comes with trade-offs. On one side: flexibility no commute long stretches of focus time and a wider pool of people to hire from. On the other: it can feel isolating relationships take effort to build and you miss the chance conversations an office creates. As our only recruiter youll need to manage your own time and stay close to the hiring managers and candidates you work with.

If you do your best work with trust and autonomy this will suit you. If youd rather have an office around you every day it probably isnt the right fit.

Our six values shape how we work day to day:

• Open for all. We default to sharing openly: source decisions and feedback with open minds to match.
• Tech needs humanity. We build with empathy for colleagues and developers alike.
• Even the best do better. We keep raising our own bar driven by curiosity not complacency.
• Bias for action. Once we know enough to act we act rather than waiting for certainty.
• Dependable by default. We take real ownership of what we ship and what we promise.
• Bold creativity wins. We treat big constraints as a reason to think differently not less.

You can read more about how we defined these values on our blog and see the team behind them on ourcareers page.

Diversity inclusion and belonging at Ably

We believe our differences as individuals are what make us great. Our people are at the heart of what we do and we encourage everyone to be their most authentic self at Ably: we see inclusivity and openness as fundamental to our long-term success. We encourage applications from all backgrounds regardless of age disability gender sexual orientation parental status race religion educational background or neurodiversity. Ably has an amazing opportunity ahead of us and we want anyone to be able to contribute to it.

If you enjoy working as part of a technology company value open source and love solving hard problems wed love to hear from you regardless of whether you fit the job description exactly or not. If in doubt drop us anemail;; were happy to give you advice on your application.

What youll get

• A remote-first and flexible work environment. Our London office (next to Old Street) is there whenever you want it. Aside from our company get-togethers youre welcome to work wherever suits you best.
• Equity. Were a growing start-up and we want everyone to share in the companys success through our EMI share options programme.
• Enhanced holiday allowance: 28 days of paid annual leave (27 regular days plus a day off to enjoy your birthday).
• Enhanced parental leave so you can spend time with your new family member: up to 16 weeks fully paid for primary caregivers and 4 weeks for secondary depending on length of service.
• A home workstation budget of 500 on joining (and 150 per year after that) so your home office serves you well.
• A personal learning and development budget of 1000 a year plus 5% L&D time during working hours to build your skills.
• Private healthcare with BUPA.
• A medical cash plan covering a range of medical and dental costs.
• Mental wellbeing coaching and counselling from Self Space.
• A monthly wellbeing budget via Juno.
• Life assurance and income protection.
• Access to Tech and Cycle to Work schemes.
• A weekly snack allowance for our end-of-week Need to Know meeting.
• A fully-paid one-month sabbatical after five years with Ably.

Required Experience:

Senior IC

Employment Type : Part-Time
Experience: years
Vacancy: 1
Daily Salary Salary: 27 - 27