Job Description

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. There's still so much to build, and we'd like your help with it.

About this role

As the Senior Talent Partner at Ably, you'll 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. You’ll be responsible for everything that makes hiring work: how we interview, the tools we use, how we source, and how candidates experience Ably. There’s a good foundation in place, and you’ll 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 isn't 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. You'll run full-cycle recruiting across the company, but engineering is where the depth matters most. You'll 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. You'll 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 Ably’s voice with candidates and the technical community. Shape our employer brand and candidate experience, and make sure new hires land well before they start.

We'd 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.

What’s it like to work at Ably?

You'll 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, you'll 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 you'd rather have an office around you every day, it probably isn't 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 our careers 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, we'd love to hear from you, regardless of whether you fit the job description exactly or not. If in doubt, drop us an email;; we're happy to give you advice on your application.

What you'll 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, you're welcome to work wherever suits you best.
• Equity. We're a growing start-up, and we want everyone to share in the company's 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.