Technical Talent Partner

The Agency Fund invests in innovations that harness human agency to improve social welfare and economic development. We back fast-growing technology nonprofits across the globe, working in health, education, livelihoods and citizen services, most of them operating alongside government and reaching more than a million people each. In addition to funding, we embed experienced technical people inside them for one to two years to build what they need.

The results: Rocket Learning went from 200,000 to 4 million children served, with cost per unit of impact falling from between $30 and $100 down to under $2. Noora Health scaled from 7 million to 30 million patients, with cost per patient falling from $9.33 to around $2. Our portfolio includes One Acre Fund, Digital Green, Noora Health, Youth Impact, Jacaranda Health and Living Goods, across India, East Africa and West Africa.

Since 2022 we have moved 18 technical professionals from industry into the social sector. Our goal is 50 a year.

The Role

We’re looking for a Technical Talent Partner to join our Operations Team. You will bring people who have built products at scale in industry into organizations where their work changes what happens to millions of people.

You will hire for our own technical team, and for the organizations we fund, many of whom are hiring their first engineer, product manager, or data lead. We have hired people from Google, Meta, Zepto, Spacelift and Atlas AI. The role exists to keep doing that at scale: moving experienced technical people out of industry and embedding them with highly effective social sector organizations that are ready for change.

What You’ll Do

• Map the market and find the people. Know which companies produce the profile we need, what makes them consider a move, and what our pitch has to overcome. Use AI across the whole funnel: mapping talent pools, surfacing non-obvious candidates, drafting outreach, and doing it at scale.
• Screen with judgment. Work out how much of what an application claims the candidate personally owned. Run a conversation that establishes what they built, which decisions were theirs, and what they would change if they did it again. Candidates know what a job description is asking for and will tell you they have it, so the skill is getting to evidence rather than assertion.
• Partner with hiring managers. Agree the role definition and the hiring bar. Challenge a role specification that does not describe what the team actually needs. Calibrate your screening against our tech team’s judgment so that one standard applies. While the assessment of technical depth stays with the tech team, you will filter the promising candidates to the tech round.
• Build the referral engine. Half our hires should come through referrals, and every person we hire should refer someone. Build it into the process, and grow our candidate roster several times over.
• Run the events. Shape and run events with VCs and technical communities in India, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and the US.
• Own the compensation conversation. We do not compete with industry on salary, and most of the people we want have never heard of the organizations we fund. Building the case for this work, and putting it in front of people before they are looking for a job, is a core part of this role.
• Run the process and close. Communicate promptly and keep candidates moving. Handle counteroffers. Keep people warm between offer and start date.
• Build the playbook. Track where candidates come from, where they drop, how long each stage takes. Use that to fix what is not working, and document what we learn so the next search starts ahead of the last one.

Who You Are

Required

• 5+ years recruiting technical roles, at least 2 of them in-house at a product company.
• You can hold a conversation with an engineer or product manager about what they built and you know when an answer is thin.
• You have designed your own screening questions and you can explain what each one was testing for.
• Strong sourcing in Indian technical markets.
• You have built something with AI that changed how you work. You can describe what you automated, what it saved you, and where it got things wrong.
• Comfortable working with several hiring managers at once, with different standards and different budgets.

Helpful

• Sourcing experience in African markets.
• A technical background of any depth, even informal.
• Experience recruiting for an organization that was not the highest bidder, or not yet well known in its market.

How we work

• Async-first, fully remote. Work from wherever you are, on hours that fit your timezone.
• 22-person team with minimal hierarchy and short feedback loops.
• You will be the first person in this role, sitting in Operations and working closely with our 7-person tech team on hiring.
• You will work alongside people who came from Google, Meta, Zepto, Spacelift and Atlas AI.

Location

• Remote, based in India.