About the Role
The short version
We're Cortex Search — a Dubai-headquartered executive search firm specialising in Technology, AI and Cybersecurity leadership. We headhunt the off-market 1%: the people who never appear on job boards because they're too busy building the future.
A team of five, growing to twenty — carefully. This seat is for a recruitment consultant who wants to do the best work of their career and be paid properly for it: £30,000 to £175,000 OTE, uncapped, tax-free.
The role
This is search, not CV-flicking. As a recruitment consultant at Cortex, you'll run assignments end to end for founders, CTOs and CISOs across the UK and GCC — mapping markets, headhunting people who aren't looking, qualifying them properly, and managing offers that regularly involve six-figure packages and international relocation.
The Gulf is pouring billions into AI and national cyber defence, and the constraint isn't money — it's talent. Your job is to find it, engage it, and move it. Discreetly, professionally, and repeatedly.
What you'll actually do
- Run retained and contingent searches across technology, AI, machine learning, data and cybersecurity roles — mid-level through to executive
- Map global talent markets and build target lists of people worth pursuing, not just people who applied
- Headhunt: approach, engage and win over candidates who are happy where they are
- Qualify hard — technical credibility, motivation, package, relocation appetite — before anyone reaches a client
- Manage full processes: interviews, feedback, offer negotiation, resignation coaching, and keeping placements alive through notice periods
- Build your own client relationships over time — the recruitment consultants who grow accounts here grow fastest
- Work directly with both founders, who still run desks and will train you on the tools, the pitch, and the market
What you'll need
- Experience as a recruitment consultant in an agency — ideally tech, but any market where you've genuinely headhunted rather than posted-and-prayed
- Resilience and structure: search is slower-burn than volume recruitment, with far bigger paydays
- Curiosity about AI and cybersecurity — you don't need to code, but you need to hold a credible conversation with a CTO and want to get better at it
- Strong written and spoken English; other languages useful across the region
- Self-sufficiency — full founder backing, zero hand-holding
- Exceptional but less-experienced? If you're hungry and coachable, apply anyway — our training took someone from zero experience to their first placement in month three
- Relocate to Dubai
What you get
- £30,000–£175,000: competitive base + uncapped, tax-free commission. Where you land in that range is decided by your billing, not your tenure. Commission-only with bigger splits available for experienced billers who back themselves
- Fees that reflect the market: senior AI and cyber placements, not volume margins
- Training and mentorship directly from the founders
- Hybrid working: 2 days from home, 3 days across our Dubai locations
- Digital Nomad Status once you're consistently on target: unlimited holiday, work from anywhere in the world
- A seat at the table while the business is still being built — and clear progression from recruitment consultant to running your own desk, then your own team
- A team of five who like each other, on the way to being twenty who do too
Who we are
We're not a CV pump. Cortex Search runs partner-led, intelligence-driven search for the hardest hires in technology. We're new and proud of it — no politics, no hiding places, and a deliberate plan to only hire people we genuinely want to build a business with.
If you want anonymity in a big machine, this isn't it. If you want to master search in the fastest-moving market on earth, we should talk.
Apply now, or reach out for a confidential conversation.