Country Launch Lead

mecka; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Mecka AI is seeking a Country Launch Lead to take new geographic markets from zero to fully functional operations. You will own the deployment lifecycle, navigating legal, regulatory, privacy, banking, and logistics, and you will build local leadership teams and processes in support of rapid market entry.

You will execute market assessments, establish local entities, set up banks and payments, and codify an expandable playbook for future expansions while ensuring compliance and operational

Qualifications

• 5 to 8+ years of experience in operational leadership, expansion operations, corporate strategy, or general management.
• Direct hands-on experience building local business operations from concept to stabilization, including legal setup, financial rails, vendor contracts, and early local hiring.
• Exceptional problem-solving skills, autonomy, and resilience when operating internationally.
• Willingness to travel to target expansion regions.

Responsibilities

• Launch leadership: own new market expansion projects and ensure smooth transfer to permanent local leadership.
• Assessment: conduct pre-launch feasibility and regulatory evaluations with counsel, ensuring privacy and import/export compliance.
• Local setup: establish entity registration, banking, offices, logistics, and localized compliance workflows.
• Team and cadence: recruit and onboard country managers and operations leads, establish SOPs and KPI scorecards.
• Playbook: refine and scale the global expansion playbook and procurement tools.

Job description

About Mecka AI

Mecka AI is building the data infrastructure layer for robotics and embodied AI.
We design and operate global systems for data capture, data labeling, and hardware-enabled workflows used by leading AI labs and robotics companies to train and validate humanoid and embodied AI systems.
We work closely with frontier robotics teams to bridge real-world data, simulation, learning-based systems, and deployed hardware.

About the Role

We operate capture operations across international markets and are aggressively expanding our global footprint.

As the Country Launch Lead, you will take full end-to-end operational accountability for taking new geographic markets from zero to fully functional, high-velocity operating units. Your mandate covers the entire deployment lifecycle: executing structured market assessment frameworks, navigating complex local legal, regulatory, and privacy requirements with local and outside counsel, establishing legal entities, banking, and physical logistics infrastructure, managing initial commercial launches and field team deployments, and executing a seamless operational handoff to permanent local leadership once steady-state performance is achieved. In parallel, you will continuously iterate on, codify, and scale our global market expansion playbook.

What You Will Be Doing:

• Launch leadership: Serve as the single point of accountability for new market expansion projects, driving execution across legal, operational, financial, and commercial workstreams to achieve target launch dates and seamlessly transfer stabilized operations to permanent local managers.

• Assessment: Execute comprehensive pre-launch feasibility assessments and legal/regulatory evaluations in partnership with legal counsel, ensuring strict adherence to regional data privacy laws, consent frameworks, import/export regulations, and local employment laws.

• Local setup: Establish initial physical and legal operating infrastructure, including entity registration, corporate bank accounts, local payment gateways, office/warehouse leases, hardware procurement, vendor logistics, and localized compliance workflows.

• Team and cadence: Recruit, onboard, and train founding local team members (country managers, operations leads, field supervisors), instilling core operating cadences, standard operating procedures, and key operational KPI scorecards from day one.

• Playbook: Continuously refine, expand, and modularize the company's global expansion playbook, standardizing budget estimation models, timeline templates, regulatory checklists, and vendor procurement toolkits for subsequent international expansions.

What You Bring:

• Experience: 5 to 8+ years of experience in operational leadership, expansion operations, corporate strategy, or general management, with demonstrated success launching at least one international country end-to-end for a high-growth, operations-intensive company.

• Setup from scratch: Direct hands-on experience building local business operations from concept to stabilization, including managing local legal setup, financial rails, commercial partner acquisition, vendor contracts, and early local hiring.

• Independence: Exceptional problem-solving skills, autonomy, and resilience when operating in unfamiliar international environments under tight constraints, paired with a willingness to travel to target expansion regions

Even Better If You Have:

• Regulatory: Deep background working directly with specialized external legal firms and government authorities to resolve complex regulatory hurdles, cross-border data transfer policies, and local labor laws.

We strive to create an inclusive work environment for all; we welcome applicants from all backgrounds and are committed to providing equal opportunities. Should you require any accommodations during the recruitment process, we will partner with you to meet your needs.

We may use AI-assisted tools to help evaluate applications against the requirements of this role. These tools support our recruiting team in identifying qualified candidates but do not replace human judgment or limit which applications may be reviewed or considered.