Technical Sourcer
About the Role
Cantina is looking for a Technical Sourcer to help build our growing video foundation model team in Singapore. You will focus on identifying and engaging exceptional research and engineering talent, particularly across China and the broader APAC region. This role requires a strong understanding of the Chinese AI talent market and enough technical fluency to identify talent across the video generation foundation model stack.
What You’ll Do
Own sourcing for specialized research and engineering roles supporting Cantina’s video foundation model team in Singapore.
Build detailed talent maps across leading AI companies, research labs, universities, and technical communities, with a strong focus on China and the broader APAC region.
Identify and engage candidates through LinkedIn, GitHub, research publications, conferences, technical communities, referrals, events, and other proof-of-work signals.
Develop trusted, long-term relationships with research scientists, machine learning engineers, technical leaders, and emerging AI talent across Mandarin-speaking markets.
Partner closely with research and engineering leaders to translate complex technical requirements into focused sourcing strategies and target profiles.
Create thoughtful, personalized outreach in English and Chinese, and assess candidates’ technical relevance, motivations, career priorities, and openness to relocating to Singapore.
Provide market intelligence on talent availability, organizational structures, compensation, mobility, and hiring trends across the Chinese AI ecosystem.
Track sourcing performance, identify funnel gaps, and continuously improve talent channels, outreach strategies, and candidate response rates.
What You’ll Bring
Bachelor’s degree in Human Resources, Business Management, or other related fields.
At least three years of experience sourcing deeply technical AI or machine learning talent, ideally across image or video generation or multimodal foundation models.
Strong knowledge of the Chinese technology and AI talent market, with existing connections across companies, research labs, universities, and technical communities.
Professional fluency in Mandarin Chinese and English, with the ability to engage senior candidates credibly in both languages.
Sufficient technical understanding to distinguish talent working across data infrastructure, video data pipelines, reward modeling, pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, quantization, reinforcement learning, distillation, inference, and model acceleration.
Experience using LinkedIn, GitHub, research publications, technical communities, referrals, conferences, events, and other proof-of-work signals to identify exceptional candidates.
A track record of building repeatable sourcing strategies for scarce technical talent through market mapping, targeted outreach, community engagement, and referral networks.
Experience recruiting from companies such as ByteDance, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, Alibaba, Tencent, MiniMax, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, or similar AI organizations is a strong advantage.