Founding Business Operations

CoffeeSpace; Kuala Lumpur; Hybrid; MYR 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Meaningful equity

Hybrid setup in Kuala Lumpur

Direct access to founders

Growth opportunities

Job summary

CoffeeSpace is building an AI-powered recruiting engine for startups in Kuala Lumpur. We are hiring a Founding Business Operations lead to work directly with the founders to scale interviews and placements weekly.

You will own a core business outcome, identify bottlenecks across candidates, clients, and partners, and build scalable processes and AI-driven workflows that move us from hundreds to thousands of interviews each week. This early role offers meaningful equity and growth.

Qualifications

• Experience in BizOps, Growth Ops, Marketplace Ops, founder’s office, recruiting, or startup work.
• Analytical mindset with ability to map funnels, bottlenecks and experiments.
• Willingness to do hands-on work across candidates, clients, product and engineering.
• AI-driven approach to automate repetitive work and improve throughput.
• Hiring exposure: you have hired, interviewed, or evaluated candidates.
• Comfort operating in an early-stage startup and building processes from scratch.

Responsibilities

• Own interview and placement growth: drive consistent week-over-week improvements in hires.
• Find and solve bottlenecks across the hiring funnel to attack high-leverage problems.
• Get hands-on with candidates, recruiting partners, and clients as needed.
• Build systems that scale: convert manual steps into better workflows, automations, and AI agents.
• Partner with product & engineering to turn operational pain into product improvements.
• Experiment constantly with new channels, partnerships, messaging, incentives, tools, and processes.
• Go wherever the constraint moves, across the entire hiring engine.

Skills

High ownership

Analytical

Fast-moving

AI-native

Hiring exposure

Adaptable

Job description

• Join CoffeeSpace as our Founding Business Operations hire, working directly with the founders to help scale one of the fastest-growing parts of the company
• Own a core business outcome: growing the number of high-quality interviews and placements we generate every week
• Work across candidates, clients, recruiting partners, product, and engineering to find the biggest bottlenecks and solve them
• Help build the systems, processes, and AI-powered workflows that take us from hundreds to eventually thousands of interviews every week
• Competitive salary + meaningful equity, with significant ownership and room to grow

CoffeeSpace is building an AI-powered recruiting engine for startups.

Our recruiting engine has grown 10x in the past seven months, recently crossing $1M+ in annualized revenue. We now work across 1,000+ startup roles, helping fast-growing companies find exceptional early employees.

We’re looking for a Business Operations Lead to own one of our most important problems: how do we continuously increase the number of great candidates who turn into interviews, offers, and hires?

About This Role

This isn’t a traditional operations role where you’ll inherit a mature process.

You’ll own a business outcome.

Today, our biggest constraint is getting more qualified candidates into interviews. Six months from now, the bottleneck might be somewhere else.

Your job is to find the bottleneck and solve it.

You’ll work across candidates, recruiting partners, clients, product, engineering, and our founders. One day you might be analyzing funnel data, the next talking to candidates or clients, testing a new acquisition channel, or working with our engineers to automate a workflow.

What You’ll Do

• Own interview and placement growth: Drive consistent week-over-week improvement in the metrics that ultimately lead to hires.
• Find and solve bottlenecks: Understand our hiring funnel end-to-end and identify the highest-leverage problem to attack next.
• Get hands-on: Work directly with candidates, recruiting partners, and clients when that’s what it takes to move the number.
• Build systems that scale: Turn manual processes into better workflows, automations, and eventually AI agents.
• Partner with product & engineering: Be one of the heaviest users of what we build and turn operational pain points into product improvements.
• Experiment constantly: Test new channels, partnerships, messaging, incentives, tools, and processes.
• Go wherever the constraint moves: Candidate supply is the focus today, but your mandate extends across the entire hiring engine.

We’re open-minded about your background. You might come from BizOps, Growth Ops, Marketplace Ops, a founder’s office, recruiting, consulting, or have built a startup yourself.

What matters is how you operate:

• High ownership: Give you a number to move, and you figure out how to move it.
• Analytical: You naturally break problems into funnels, metrics, bottlenecks, and experiments.
• Fast-moving: You’re equally comfortable thinking strategically and doing the messy work yourself.
• AI-native: You actively use AI and software to multiply your output and automate repetitive work.
• Hiring exposure: You’ve hired, recruited, interviewed, or meaningfully evaluated candidates before.
• Adaptable: You don’t need an existing playbook. You’re excited to build a better one.

Experience working at an early-stage startup, recruiting across multiple companies, or operating a marketplace is a strong plus.

Why CoffeeSpace

You’ll join a small team at an inflection point: 10x revenue growth in seven months and $1M+ annualized revenue, with a huge amount still left to build.

You’ll work directly with the founders and across the company, with real ownership over a number that directly drives our growth.

The challenge is simple to describe and hard to solve:

How do we build a recruiting engine capable of generating hundreds, and soon enough thousands, of high-quality interviews every week?

That’s what you’ll help us figure out.

• Competitive salary + meaningful equity
• Flexible hybrid setup in Kuala Lumpur
• Tight-knit team working across Malaysia and San Francisco
• High autonomy and direct access to the founders
• Significant room to grow as one of the earliest business hires on the team

We keep things practical and collaborative, designed to understand how you think and operate:

• Intro conversation (20-30 minutes): Get to know each other and your background
• Business case (30-45 minutes): Work through a structured business problem to understand how you break down problems, prioritize, and make decisions
• Working session (1-2 hours): Work alongside the team on a real CoffeeSpace challenge to see how you collaborate, dig into ambiguity, and turn ideas into action
• Final conversation (30 minutes): Align on fit, expectations, and ambitions