Gentry Partners

Gentry Partners is a recruitment company specialising in the hiring of scientists and engineers for artificial intelligence work. It is run by Garett Gentry and describes itself as maintaining deep and lasting connections across both industry and academia, a position it uses to move researchers between the two. The company states that it has helped dozens of academics make the transition into industry, and hundreds of scientists and engineers make significant career moves. Its focus is deliberately narrow, and everything on the site is organised around that single specialism rather than around a general recruitment offer.

The technical fields it covers are machine learning, computer vision, robotics, natural language processing and understanding, and other AI domains. The client experience behind the company is in the AI research labs of large technology employers: since 2014 Garett Gentry has recruited AI scientists and engineers for AI focused search teams at Amazon, Meta, where he worked with FAIR, Google AI and Cruise. Before that he was instrumental in scaling startups including Palantir, and he began his recruiting career in retained executive search for academia, which explains the company's continuing reach into university research groups.

The case Gentry Partners makes rests on the references it publishes from named clients and candidates in the field. Siddhartha Srinivasa, distinguished engineer at Cruise and professor of robotics at the University of Washington, describes him as thoughtful, patient and incredibly helpful in decision making, turning a high stress decision into a more pleasant one. Michael Seltzer, director of Meta AI, calls him one of the most thoughtful and effective recruiters of senior talent he has worked with, an expert at his craft who builds trusting relationships with hiring managers and candidates and navigates complex situations with empathy and care. Charles Elkan, chief executive of ficc.ai and formerly of Amazon, says he listens genuinely to candidates and hiring managers alike and stays in touch after a candidate joins.