Best 19 Machine Learning Recruiters for AI-First Companies
Meet the most reputable ML recruiters & headhunters who specialize in connecting AI-driven companies with elite talent. ↓
Machine learning is essential for AI-first companies, and finding top talent is crucial for success.
This list highlights the best recruiters who specialize in sourcing exceptional ML professionals, helping AI companies scale and innovate.
- Dave Fox
- Renu Sevanthi
- Anna Heneghan
- Shikha Bakshi
- Josef Günthner
- Adrian Clarke
- Minho Cho
- Chris Morrow
- Lindsey Duran
- Rob Reeves
- Matt Stabile
- David Farmer
- Joel Riet
- Jake Jorgovan
- Kelly Gauthier
- Alyesha Sayle
- Matt Reaney
- Abhilash Chipkar
- Nidhi Bajaj
Below we provide more detailed profiles of each recruiter.
Dave Fox
Nationality: American
Dave leads Focus GTS, a specialized staffing firm for AI and cloud talent.
He is often described as “one of the top recruiters in AI and tech”, connecting companies with niche experts in as little as 48 hours. An entrepreneur and podcast guest, Fox shares insights on leveraging AI in recruiting and has grown Focus GTS into a multimillion-dollar business.
- LinkedIn: Dave Fox
- X (Twitter): @davefoxceo
Renu Sevanthi
Nationality: Indian
At Apple, our focus is on attracting top-tier ML talent to drive innovation and build the future of technology.
Renu leads Apple’s recruiting across India, responsible for staffing strategy and end-to-end talent acquisition for “high-end technology streams” including AI and machine learning.
With over 13 years at Apple, Sevanthi has built out teams for Apple’s engineering and R&D operations in India, focusing on leadership hiring and critical technical roles. Her work ensures Apple India attracts top local ML talent to drive innovation.
- LinkedIn: Renu Sevanthi
Anna Heneghan
Nationality: British
Anna brands herself as “The Machine Learning Recruiter” with 7+ years filling ML engineer roles.
She has led a growing ML & AI recruiting team, boasts an extensive candidate network, and even earned recognition as an Outstanding Advocate for Women in Tech 2023. Heneghan actively posts jobs and hiring insights on LinkedIn to engage the ML community.
- LinkedIn: Anna Heneghan
Shikha Bakshi
Nationality: Indian
Leadership hiring in AI requires not just expertise, but the ability to align top talent with an organization’s long-term vision.
Shikha drives AI/ML hiring at Fractal Analytics and was featured among the top AI recruiters in India.
With a background in business administration, she rose through Fractal’s ranks over 6 years to lead capacity hiring. Bakshi is known for her expertise in leadership hiring, stakeholder management, and sourcing strategies specific to data science and AI roles.
- LinkedIn: Shikha Bakshi
Josef Günthner
Nationality: German
Josef co-founded PALTRON, a leading recruitment agency focused on AI and Machine Learning talent.
Under his leadership, PALTRON was honored as a “Top Personnel Service Provider” in Germany. Günthner’s firm built a network of over 600,000 IT experts and earned a reputation for high-quality candidate matches in emerging tech fields. He emphasizes finding “highly coveted machine learning professionals” to keep clients at the cutting edge.
- LinkedIn: Josef Günthner
Adrian Clarke
Nationality: British
Adrian is known as the “Data Science Headhunter” running an executive search consultancy for analytics and ML roles.
He has over 10 years of experience placing top data scientists and AI specialists in Europe and beyond. Clarke often speaks on hiring trends (e.g. on the SuperDataScience podcast) and is active on LinkedIn, where he’s an “aficionado” of using the platform for sourcing talent. His firm focuses on leadership placements (Heads of AI, Chief Data Scientists) for enterprise clients.
- LinkedIn: Adrian Clarke
- X (Twitter): @clarkesearch
Minho Cho
Nationality: South Korean
Minho is a talent acquisition expert who transitioned from software engineering into recruiting.
He served as a Machine Learning Recruiter at Facebook (Meta), where he leveraged his technical background to fill challenging AI roles. Cho also led recruitment for Samsung’s U.S. operations and Audible (Amazon), consistently hiring top ML engineers and researchers. His blend of coding and recruiting expertise enables him to vet candidates deeply and reduce time-to-hire for ML positions.
- LinkedIn: Minho Cho
Chris Morrow
Nationality: British
Chris is a LinkedIn Top Voice in recruiting who founded Digitalent, an agency dedicated to AI & ML recruitment.
With 20 years in recruitment, he specializes in global AI talent searches (permanent, contract, and executive) and shares insider hiring tips on his weekly newsletter and podcast. Morrow’s thought leadership (he’s an AWS Certified AI Practitioner) and content on Recruiting Brainfood have made him a prominent voice on AI hiring trends.
- LinkedIn: Chris Morrow
- X (Twitter): @ChrisMCareers
Lindsey Duran
Nationality: American
Lindsey leads worldwide recruiting at NVIDIA, one of the foremost AI hardware and research companies.
She has played a pivotal role in scaling NVIDIA’s talent base amid the surge in AI demand, and has shared key strategies for landing AI jobs at the company. Duran’s insights emphasize the importance of strong ML fundamentals and passion, reflecting her mission to attract top-tier AI researchers and engineers.
- LinkedIn: Lindsey Duran
Rob Reeves
Nationality: American
Rob is a veteran tech recruiter who founded Redfish Technology back in 1996.
Over decades, he evolved Redfish from a West Coast IT recruiting boutique to a nationwide firm specializing in high-tech (including green tech and AI) placements. Reeves is known for his creative, resourceful approach and deep industry knowledge, helping countless startups and enterprises hire top machine learning and software talent.
- LinkedIn: Rob Reeves
Matt Stabile
Nationality: American
Matt is often called “NYC’s top-rated Quant Finance, AI, and Data Science recruiter.”
Formerly Executive Recruiter and COO at Averity, Stabile founded Stabile Search in 2023 to focus on executive-level data science and ML hires. He has nearly a decade in tech recruiting (after a prior career as an attorney) and is known for placing VP and Director-level ML professionals at Fortune 500s and startups alike.
- LinkedIn: Matt Stabile
David Farmer
Nationality: British
David is the co-founder (with Simon Clarke) of Harnham, widely regarded as the world’s largest data and analytics recruitment consultancy.
Since 2006, Farmer has helped Harnham “very quickly establish” itself as a global leader in placing data scientists, analysts, and AI specialists. Harnham’s teams in the UK, US, and EU focus only on Data & AI hiring, giving them unmatched market immersion. Farmer, now CEO, remains hands-on and has overseen Harnham’s expansion into new regions (e.g. opening offices in the US tech hubs).
- LinkedIn: David Farmer
Joel Riet
Nationality: Dutch
Joel is a LinkedIn Top Voice (2022) who bills himself as an “AI, ML & Data Science Recruiter connecting top talent with innovation-driven teams.”
He shares abundant content on how candidates can stand out in AI hiring. Based in the Netherlands, Riet has a strong online presence and has helped European startups and scale-ups hire their first data science and ML engineers. His mission is to make AI hiring “human, fair & fun”, often discussing ethical AI recruitment practices on LinkedIn.
- LinkedIn: Joel Riet
Jake Jorgovan
Nationality: American
Jake is an entrepreneur-recruiter who co-founded Alpha Apex Group in 2020, an executive search firm specialized in AI talent.
He has published numerous “top recruiters” lists on his blog and is deeply involved in matching companies with leadership in AI/ML. Under Jorgovan’s guidance, Alpha Apex has placed over 2,000 executives and partnered with firms like Meta, AWS, and Siemens. (He’s also known for B2B podcasting via Content Allies.)
- LinkedIn: Jake Jorgovan
Kelly Gauthier
Nationality: Canadian
Kelly is a specialist AI and data science headhunter working with clients across Canada, the US, and Europe.
As founder of Higher (an AI recruitment firm), she focuses on sourcing hard-to-find ML researchers, data scientists, and AI engineers. Gauthier’s international reach and deep understanding of the AI talent market have made her a trusted partner for companies building advanced analytics teams.
- LinkedIn: Kelly Gauthier
Alyesha Sayle
Nationality: American
Alyesha specializes in placing niche machine learning talent into top research labs, hedge funds, and tech firms.
Currently an AVP at Trace, she focuses on recruiting ML researchers and engineers in quant finance and tech. Previously, Alyesha was a Principal Machine Learning Recruiter at Big Cloud, a well-known AI recruiting agency. With experience managing recruitment teams and even advising a diversity-in-AI startup, she is passionate about hard-to-find skills like NLP, deep learning, and “quant AI” talent.
- LinkedIn: Alyesha Sayle
Matt Reaney
Nationality: British
Matt founded Big Cloud in 2013, one of the first recruitment firms devoted to Big Data and Machine Learning roles.
Under Reaney’s leadership, Big Cloud grew into a global data science staffing powerhouse, with a community of data scientists and ML engineers built through events and content. Big Cloud has earned testimonials for successfully filling multiple machine learning research and engineering positions for clients. Reaney himself is an active voice on social media and Starter Story interviews, sharing how he scaled to $250K/month in revenue by 2020 purely focusing on data/AI talent.
- LinkedIn: Matt Reaney
- X (Twitter): @mattreaney_
Abhilash Chipkar
Nationality: Indian
Abhilash works as a Technical Recruiter at LinkedIn India, where he focuses on engineering roles including Site Reliability and platform engineering – skills closely adjacent to machine learning infrastructure.
With 7+ years in tech recruitment, Chipkar is “greatly motivated to search for talent to make quality connections”, aiming to find candidates who strengthen LinkedIn’s technical teams. Before joining LinkedIn, he spent 3 years at a recruitment agency, giving him a mix of agency and in-house perspective.
- LinkedIn: Abhilash Chipkar
Nidhi Bajaj
Nationality: Indian
Nidhi manages talent acquisition at Myntra (a major Indian e-commerce and fashion tech company).
She has a demonstrated history of hiring in the internet industry and is “skilled in analytics recruiting, sourcing, and screening”, having previously worked at Jabong (another fashion e-commerce). At Myntra, Bajaj handles end-to-end lateral hiring for functions like retail, digital marketing, and data/analytics roles to drive the company’s data-driven growth.
Her track record in hiring data-savvy professionals in a consumer tech context earns her a spot among top ML-focused recruiters in India.
- LinkedIn: Nidhi Bajaj
Sum Up
These top machine learning recruiters have made a substantial impact on AI-first companies by identifying exceptional talent, fostering innovation, and spearheading expansion into AI markets. However, working with these experts directly can be difficult due to their high demand and premium fees.
A viable solution is partnering with EchoGlobal, where our deep expertise in the AI sector and vast global network ensure seamless connections with the right ML professionals to fuel your company’s growth.
Note: We’ve dedicated significant time and effort to creating and verifying this curated list of top professionals. However, if you believe a correction or addition is needed, feel free to reach out. We’ll gladly review and update the page.
Lou Reverchuk