Talent Acquisition Lead

About Adelphi: Adelphi builds AI-enabled secure data access and sharing technology for the U.S. intelligence and defense communities. Our product creates a secure enclave where data stays where it lives and only governed answers travel out, enabling federated data discovery that cuts intelligence-sharing time from months to minutes. We close the gap between fragmented systems and the speed at which analysts and teams need to act. Actively deployed across key defense and intelligence agency programs, Adelphi has doubled its team in the past quarter alone and is hiring aggressively to keep pace with expanding mission demand. This is a rare chance to join a team still small enough that your impact is immediate, at a moment when that's changing fast.

About the Role: Adelphi's at an inflection point and we're hiring our first Talent Acquisition Lead. The business has 10x'd in under two years and has built trust with the highest senior leaders at the Department of War and Intelligence Community. Our Vision is to build the biggest AI Deployment company for National Security, which requires talent that is extremely good at problem solving, gets excited about National Security challenges, and thrives in software factories. We're executing a Mission that (1) Identifies the core bottlenecks in Warfighting, Intelligence and the Enterprise, (2) Assign top talent with backgrounds in systems and machine learning engineering (3) Finds repeatability in solution development to target similar offices across the DoW/IC. We're now scaling this flywheel and are excited about building out the Talent function with someone who thinks with an engineering-first mindset, is relentless about attracting exceptional talent, and works closely with our hiring managers to brainstorm the dynamics of our customer-facing teams.

Clearance Requirement: Candidates must be clearance eligible.

What You’ll Do:

• Full-Cycle Technical Recruiting: Own end-to-end recruitment across Adelphi, running high-touch candidate experiences from initial outreach, scheduling and coordinating technical screens, case studies, all interactions, to offer negotiations and closing candidates.

• Targeted Talent Acquisition: Design and execute proactive sourcing strategies to identify, engage, and pipeline top-tier technical, engineering, and specialized talent across all critical business functions.

• Engineering Partnership & Structured Assessment: Partner closely with engineering teams and technical evaluators to design rubric-driven interview processes that ensure fast, consistent, and objective evaluations.

• Recruiting Infrastructure & Playbooks: Build and document scalable recruiting operations from scratch, such as candidate trackers, process guides, scorecard templates, and interview workflows.

• Talent Strategy & Vendor Management: Create and own Adelphi’s talent strategy, evaluate platform/sourcing tool performance, and selectively manage external agency or staffing relationships when needed.

• Employer Branding: Work closely with leadership to enhance and promote Adelphi’s brand, making us a talent magnet for top performers in the defense and intelligence communities.

Who You Are

• Proven Talent Leader: A strategic self-starter who transforms ambiguity into structured recruiting strategies, backed by hands-on experience scaling teams within early-stage or high-growth startup environments.

• 0-to-1 Builder: Proven track record operating as a foundational talent partner. You are comfortable building ATS setups, playbooks, and recruiting infrastructure from scratch with minimal supervision.

• Technical & Specialized Sourcing Expertise: Demonstrated success sourcing, engaging, and closing hard-to-find software engineers, AI/ML specialists, and cross-functional operators in competitive markets.

• Brand & Storytelling Mindset: Skilled at framing a company's mission and technical culture into a compelling candidate value proposition across outreach and talent networks.

• Hands-On & Execution-Minded: Thrives working at both the tactical level (sourcing candidates, managing pipelines, scheduling) and strategic level (crafting offer frameworks, partnering with executive leadership).

• Clear & Direct Communicator: Strong stakeholder management skills with the confidence to advise hiring managers, manage candidate expectations, and partner directly with C-suite leadership.

• Familiarity with Clearable/Federal hiring: Prior experience recruiting technical talent supporting government, defense, or intelligence agency customers with familiarity in clearable and non-clearable candidate pools.

Why Adelphi?

• Direct Ownership: You will build the foundation of our recruiting engine; every process, tracker, and workflow you establish will shape how Adelphi scales.

• High Impact: Direct ownership of hiring outcomes at a fast-moving, seed-stage company with active government contracts and significant growth ahead.

• Mission-Driven Work: The engineers you hire will build the foundational data and artificial intelligence infrastructure that the U.S. defense and intelligence communities depend on.

Benefits:

• Healthcare coverage: 100% employee premium and 50% dependents premium coverage.

• 401K with 2% company match.

• $500 monthly Physical and Mental Health reimbursement program.

• Unlimited time-off policy.

• Opportunity to work on impactful projects in the national security sector.

• Career growth and leadership opportunities in a dynamic, innovative environment.