Founder's Associate

Downtown San Francisco
· in-person 5 days a week $90-130K

Risely is the AI workforce for higher education. We're live at four schools and growing fast.

We're hiring a Founder's Associate.

You'll work directly with the founders to support and manage the company behind the scenes. The job is to take the messy operational reality of an early-stage startup and turn it into something that actually functions. Anything that needs an owner becomes yours until someone else picks it up.

Think of yourself as the operating system of the company. The founders are doing customer calls, hiring, fundraising, and product. You're making sure everything else moves: the internal processes, the data, the tools, the follow-ups, the projects in flight, the things that would otherwise slip.

A normal day might look like this:

• Morning: tighten up the financial model
• Midday: build a Claude Code agent that enriches a CRM list
• Afternoon: sit in on a customer call, take notes, own the follow-ups
• Evening: clean up a hiring pipeline before logging off

• Support and manage internal operations. Vendors, contracts, hiring logistics, finance ops, the back office. You keep the machine humming so the founders can stay focused on the rest.
• Actually build internal tools and agents. We run a lot of Claude Code in parallel. You'll write real Python and Type Script that automates the next manual process: CRM hygiene, prospect research, reporting, internal workflows. Hands-on engineering.
• Own strategic projects end to end. Market research, competitive analysis, hiring sprints, vendor evaluations, special projects the founders need someone to drive. You scope it, do it, ship it.
• Keep the company organized. Notion hygiene, project tracking, meeting prep and follow-ups. You're the reason nothing falls through the cracks.
• Support customer launches. New customer signed? You're in the trenches of every launch: supporting kickoff, coordinating integration timelines, tracking internal handoffs, getting things ready for go-live. Launches are how we turn contracts into ARR.
• Support sales execution. Pipeline research, prospect outreach, deal follow-ups, proposal building, customer recaps, conference prep. The founders run the deals; you're the operator behind them, making sure everything moves.
• Make customers successful post-launch. Sit in on calls, track whether they're getting value, flag issues early, own the operational side of the relationship.
• Be the second pair of eyes. Catch what fell through. Ship the deck. Own the loose ends.

An operator  kind of person who looks at a chaotic process and instinctively wants to clean it up, document it, and automate the boring parts.

• Master of your own time. You'll have ten things going at once and that feels normal. You prioritize ruthlessly, switch context fast, and protect time for the work that actually matters.
• You actually build. Python, SQL, APIs, scripts that run nightly. You've shipped real code before and you use it every day.
• AI-native. You've built something real with Claude or Cursor and have opinions on where agents add leverage and where they don't.
• Sharp writer. Memos, recaps, internal docs, customer emails. People understand what you mean and act on it.
• Naturally organized. You take notes that you can find later. Things you commit to get done.

0-2 years out of school. You're joining the founding team and the upside reflects that.

Risely is a startup in the truest sense. We are all in. The pace is intense and the work is demanding, and the impact is real.

• In-person commitment. We're in the office together. Building at this stage takes full presence and full focus, and that often means evenings and the occasional Saturday.
• Speed and impact. Your…