Founding Operations Manager

Location: Remote (global). You must overlap ≥ 4 hours per day with EU working hours. Our core is in Spain and Portugal.

Team: Operations. Reports jointly to the three co-founders — day-to-day to the operator-founder, with specific surfaces owned by the AI Expert (Chief AI Officer) and the M&A Expert (Head of M&A).

Level: IC2 · Operations Associate (posted title: Founding Operations Manager — reflects founding-hire scope on an IC2 band).

Why this role exists:

Three co-founders, a platform 85% built, 2,400+ AI companies profiled, and an active buyer-outreach operation running into launch. What we do not have is a dedicated operator. So the founders are running scheduling, client comms across buyers and sellers, pipeline hygiene, tool stitching, and vendor chasing — instead of fundraising, product, and deal sourcing.

This role absorbs that work and professionalizes it. You take the mess off the founders' desks and turn it into playbooks, SLAs, and a clean AI-augmented ops stack. The next person to join ops will inherit what you build.

What you'll own in your first 6 months

- Reclaim ≥ 10 hours per week for each co-founder by absorbing recurring ops — verified by calendar audits at month 3 and month 6.

- Own buyer and seller client-comms end-to-end: response SLA ≤ 24 hours, first-response ≤ 4 hours during EU hours, tracked in the CRM.

- Select, pilot, and put into daily team use an AI-augmented ops stack. You propose; founders approve. No tool is in the stack until you can show the workflow and the time it saves.

- Own the weekly ops review: pipeline hygiene, follow-up status, blockers surfaced to founders, metrics reported.

- Document the top 5 recurring ops workflows as playbooks. Acceptance test: another person can execute the workflow from your doc without you present.

What you bring

- Evidence of shipping self-directed work with a measurable before/after result. Portfolio, freelance projects, past roles, independent builds — any context where the outcome is provable. Titles and tenure are not the signal; shipped work is.

- Daily, fluent use of AI tools as leverage. ChatGPT/Claude/Perplexity plus at least one workflow tool (Notion AI, Zapier, n8n, Lindy, Make, or similar). You can walk us through a specific workflow you designed — not just name the tools.

- Proof you can run 5+ parallel threads without dropping handoffs. Concurrent clients, concurrent projects, high daily context switches, or any equivalent pattern.

- Action bias. Examples where you chose to ship a rough version over waiting for a complete plan — and the rough version was the right call.

- English fluent enough for written client work with international counterparties.

Nice to have

- Exposure to M&A, venture, or B2B SaaS operations.

- Second language useful for EU, CIS, UK, or US markets (Spanish, Russian, German).

- Experience operating in high-ambiguity, low-process environments — any stage, any domain.

This role is NOT for you if

- You want a theoretical or strategist seat.

- You need a defined playbook before you act.

- You prefer narrow specialization over breadth.

- You want predictable 9-to-5 scope.

How we work

Values that actually show up day to day: Speed Over Perfection (being right but slow is losing), Brutal Honesty (direct feedback beats diplomatic response), Expert-Driven (technology augments expertise; it does not replace it). Weekend MVP builds happen when a bet warrants them — signal that speed is real, not rhetoric. You will work directly with the founders across AI, M&A, and platform — the surface area is unusual, the pace is unusual, the rate of learning is unusual.

What you get

- 1:1 mentorship from three founders with complementary domains: AI architecture, M&A, and platform/UX.

- Front-row seat to a pre-seed → Series A journey of an AI-native M&A marketplace.

- Unusual surface area: you will touch product, deal flow, investor relations, outreach, and customer ops.

- Outcome-led growth with no ceiling — advancement is tied to shipped results, not tenure.

- Freedom to propose and build your own AI-tool stack.

Compensation

Pre-seed, stage-appropriate base; specific numbers are discussed at the first screen. If compensation is your primary lever, this is not the right seat — growth and surface area are the compounding assets of this role.

How to apply

Send a CV, 3–5 minute Loom video or a written note of 300 words or fewer describing one operational mess you personally untangled. Structure it as:

1. Before — what the state was and why it mattered.

2. Action — the specific thing you did (not your team — you).

3. After — the measurable result.