San Francisco & Bay Area
Tech recruiters in San Francisco
We started here. Our founders built and scaled companies in San Francisco and the Bay Area. We're locals, not tourists. That matters when you're trying to hire someone out of a Mag 7 company or close a candidate who's comparing your Series A to a Google L5 offer. Local context changes how conversations go.
San Francisco Tech Recruiting
The Bay Area market
Where we source
We don't just source from LinkedIn. We look at Hugging Face contributors, arXiv paper authors, and people helping others in technical Discord channels. That's where the actual builders are, not job boards.
How we position offers
When someone's comparing your Series A to Meta's $800K package or OpenAI's equity, we help structure the conversation. Series B liquidity timelines, compute budgets for researchers, equity that's actually worth something. Not just "competitive comp."
Two different profiles
AI recruiting splits into builders (who want eval-driven development and reliable systems) and researchers (who want guaranteed compute access). We screen for different things depending on which one you need.
Market Insights
San Francisco tech recruiting in 2025
The Bay Area is reconsolidating as the AI hub. Understanding what's happening helps you compete.
24% growth
AI talent in the Bay Area grew 24% year-over-year, even as overall tech hiring slowed. SF is where AI engineers are concentrating. Source: CBRE
$303K median
Median ML/AI engineer salary in the Bay Area. AI engineers command a 5% salary premium and 10-20% equity premium over other engineering roles. Source: Levels.fyi
75% of AI funding
The Bay Area has attracted three-quarters of U.S. AI venture capital since 2019. The talent follows the capital. Source: CBRE
Our Approach
San Francisco tech recruiting
When we pitch your role to someone at Anthropic or Google DeepMind, we don't sell "fast-paced startup." We talk about what they can't get at a frontier lab: ownership over architecture decisions, or freedom from endless alignment meetings. The pitch changes based on who we're talking to.
Entry-level at Figma starts around $240K. Senior engineers at Databricks pull $584K+. We know what you're competing against and help you position offers that actually close, not just ones that look competitive on paper.
We've been recruiting in San Francisco for 15+ years. We've closed candidates out of OpenAI, helped founders hire their first 10 engineers, and seen what actually works versus what sounds good in theory.
San Francisco Office
SOMA
Rocket was founded and headquartered in San Francisco.
333 Bryant St
San Francisco, CA 94107
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Rocket is one of the best recruiting companies we've partnered with. They've only brought the highest quality talent.