Associate Director, AI

About us

Christian & Timbers has been placing CEOs, boards, and technology leaders since 1980, with more than 5,000 executive placements and 500 CEO searches. Today, we are the fastest-growing executive search firm in the United States and the first retained executive search firm built for AI, the firm behind AI leadership hires at the companies building the field. TechCrunch covered our Elite FDE Scarcity Study exclusively, reporting our finding that only about 2,000 engineers in the U.S. can deliver real return on enterprise AI. Not 2,000 available. 2,000 total.

The role

In applied AI, the leaders who matter are shipping LLM systems in production, often at companies building on or for Anthropic and OpenAI. As Associate Director in our AI practice, you will run retained searches in this market, map talent pools nobody else has mapped, and put validated candidates in front of clients faster than any competitor.

What you will own

• Searches, end to end. Strategy, mapping, outreach, assessment, and close, with a partner accountable for the relationship and you accountable for the work.
• Market mapping. A tiered, defensible target universe across AI labs, AI native startups, and companies building on frontier models.
• Senior outreach. Messages that a Head of Applied AI or a Distinguished Engineer actually answers.
• Technical screening. What shipped, at what scale, and what the candidate owned versus what their team did.
• Assessments clients trust. The signal and how you validated it. Artifacts, numbers, and peer references, not adjectives.
• Your research team. You set priorities for the analysts on each search and keep Loxo and HubSpot accurate.

Must have

• Intellectual curiosity. You follow applied AI on your own time and would rather read a primary source than a summary.
• Intensity and ambition. You want to be a partner, or at least find out whether you can be.
• Three or more years in executive search or technical recruiting , or deep operating experience in applied AI plus a real appetite for search.
• Real fluency in applied AI LLM systems, AI native companies, and the engineers and researchers who build them.
• Excellent written English. Your profiles reach boards and CEOs largely unedited.
• Comfort with a fast pace. Several live searches, shifting priorities, high standards.

Nice to have

Retained search experience, venture- or PE-backed clients, a technical background, or an existing network in AI labs and AI native startups.

What you get

• A written path to Partner, decided on evidence, not tenure, with a named partner sponsor from week one
• A dedicated research team behind every search
• Searches at the center of the AI buildout
• Competitive base salary with performance-linked upside

How remote works

Fully remote anywhere in the United States on Pacific Time, or hybrid if you are in Cleveland or San Francisco. Four optional in-person team meetups a year, with travel covered.

Christian & Timbers is an equal opportunity employer.