Founder’s Associate — AI, Automation & Business Operations

Pyrovio; Ann Arbor (MI); Hybrid; USD 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Pyrovio in Ann Arbor is seeking a Founder’s Associate to work directly with the Founder/CEO across business operations, AI and automation, new ventures, and the ongoing challenges of building and operating multiple businesses.

This is an entrepreneurial apprenticeship—hands-on, non-traditional, with no neatly defined list of responsibilities. You’ll learn fast, design solutions, and move between mundane tasks and sophisticated problem solving in a hybrid, in-office role.

Qualifications

• Extreme growth mindset
• Extremely curious
• Very fast learner
• Highly self-directed
• Technically capable
• Business savvy
• Comfortable with numbers and financial concepts
• Comfortable building AI agents and automations
• Comfortable figuring out unfamiliar software and systems
• Organized without needing someone else to organize you
• Resourceful
• Persistent
• Low ego
• Comfortable with ambiguity
• Willing to get your hands dirty
• Able to communicate clearly with both technical and business people
• Someone who finishes things
• High agency

Responsibilities

• Be involved in the practical workings of multiple businesses and initiatives.
• Assist with business operations tasks: tidy data, resolve issues, organize information, and prepare decision documents.
• Design and implement AI agents, automation workflows, and RPA solutions.
• Research unfamiliar business issues and build models or processes where needed.
• Collaborate with Founder on opportunities from idea to execution.
• Improve processes and identify opportunities for automation or simplification.

Job description

Please read job description carefully. Applicants who have not read the job description will be disqualified.

Founder’s Associate — AI, Automation & Business Operations

Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan — Hybrid - Min 3 days a week in Office in Ann Arbor

Employment: Full-Time

Experience: Early Career / High Potential

This Is an Unusual Role. We are looking for an unusual person.

Someone early in their career who is exceptionally curious, entrepreneurial, technically capable, business savvy, and eager to take on problems where there may be no playbook, no established process, and sometimes no obvious answer.

You will work directly with the Founder/CEO across business operations, AI and automation, new ventures, special projects, and the countless problems that emerge while building and operating businesses.

Some of the work will be exciting.

Some of it will be mundane.

Some of it will initially seem impossible.

All of it matters.

The person who succeeds in this role has a simple mentality:

Nothing is above me. Nothing is beneath me. And very little is impossible if I am willing to figure it out. Someone with extreme growth mindset, and extreme eagerness to learn and accelerate their career.

The Role

This is not a traditional Chief of Staff position. It is not an Executive Assistant position. The Founder/CEO already has dedicated Executive Assistant support for calendar, scheduling, meeting logistics and other associated tasks. It is not an AI analyst position. And it is definitely not a position where you will receive a neatly defined list of responsibilities and simply execute them.

Think of this position as an entrepreneurial apprenticeship combined with a hands‑on operating role.

You will be exposed to how businesses are built, operated, improved, automated, and sometimes created from scratch. Your job is to take things that need to happen and help make them happen.

You will repeatedly encounter processes and problems in different stages of maturity.

Sometimes you will inherit a messy manual process.

What You Will Actually Do

You will become involved in the practical workings of multiple businesses and initiatives.

Business Operations

That can mean:

• Cleaning up a broken spreadsheet or dataset.
• Figuring out a vendor or operational problem.
• Building a financial model.
• Researching an unfamiliar business issue.
• Organizing scattered information into a usable system.
• Preparing a presentation or decision document.
• Following an issue through until it is resolved.
• Developing a business process where none exists.
• Taking over a repetitive process temporarily so you can understand and redesign it.
• Finding information nobody else has been able to find.
• Working through administrative tasks that need intelligence and ownership rather than calendar management.
• Taking responsibility for the miscellaneous things that otherwise fall between organizational boundaries.

There is no category of legitimate work that is “too basic” for this position. At the same time, there is no problem that you should automatically assume is “too sophisticated” for you to attempt.

AI Agents, Automation & RPA

AI and automation are not experimental components of this position. They are core capabilities.

We expect you to already be capable of building things.

You should be comfortable:

• Designing and building AI agents.
• Creating multi‑step agentic workflows.
• Building Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions.
• Connecting applications using APIs.
• Building workflow automations across business systems.
• Using low‑code/no‑code automation platforms where appropriate.
• Working with LLMs beyond basic prompting.
• Structuring data and information for AI‑enabled workflows.
• Creating scripts or lightweight applications when needed.
• Using AI‑assisted coding tools to build solutions rapidly.
• Designing human‑in‑the‑loop controls where full automation is inappropriate.
• Testing, debugging, monitoring, and improving automated workflows.

You do not necessarily need to be a traditional software engineer. But you must be a builder.

We will expect candidates to show us things they have actually built.

Process Improvement

A major part of your job is finding repetitive work and making it disappear.

You should naturally ask: Why are we doing this? Why are we doing it this way? Can it be simplified? Can it be standardized? Can software do part of it? Can an AI agent do it? Can the entire process be redesigned?

Sometimes the correct answer will be automation. Sometimes the correct answer will simply be a better process. Good judgment means knowing the difference.

Special Projects & New Ventures

You will also work directly with the Founder on opportunities that may begin with nothing more than an idea or a question. You may know almost nothing about the subject when the assignment begins.

Who We Are Looking For

Your exact degree or career path matters less than your capabilities and trajectory. You might come from engineering, computer science, business, finance, economics, operations, consulting, entrepreneurship, or something entirely different. What matters is that you combine business judgment with technical capability.

You are:

• Extreme growth mindset
• Extremely curious.
• A very fast learner.
• Highly self‑directed.
• Technically capable.
• Business savvy.
• Comfortable with numbers and financial concepts.
• Comfortable building AI agents and automations.
• Comfortable figuring out unfamiliar software and systems.
• Organized without needing someone else to organize you.
• Resourceful.
• Persistent.
• Low ego.
• Comfortable with ambiguity.
• Willing to get your hands dirty.
• Able to communicate clearly with both technical and business people.
• Someone who finishes things.

Most importantly, you have high agency.

Nothing Above You. Nothing Beneath You. This position requires someone who can move comfortably between mundane execution and sophisticated problem solving.

This principle is important enough to state explicitly. You may spend the morning discussing a new business opportunity with the Founder. Two hours later, you may be scanning and filing paperwork until you find ways to automate it.

Entrepreneurial Ambition. We are particularly interested in people who believe they may eventually want to build something of their own. That is not a negative for this position. It may actually make you a better candidate.

This role provides unusual exposure to the realities of entrepreneurship: strategy, technology, operations, finance, customers, people, processes, automation, new ventures—and the mundane work required to make all of those things function.

This is a hybrid positions. Your presence for min of 3 days a week in-office in Ann Arbor, Michigan is required.

There is no predetermined career path for this position. That is part of the opportunity. As your capabilities develop, you could grow toward:

Entrepreneur in Residence for one of our businesses | Senior Founder’s Associate | Chief of Staff | AI & Automation Lead | Operations Lead | Product Lead | Venture Lead | General Manager

Or perhaps eventually:

Founder for your own business

We are looking for someone who wants an unusual opportunity because they intend to have an unusual career.