Founder's Associate · Operations

SAGARIS; McLean (VA); Hybrid; USD 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Founding equity

Competitive salary

Remote-first with in-person offsites

Hardware budget

Health insurance

Generous PTO

Direct access to founders

Job summary

SAGARIS is seeking a Founder's Associate to partner with the founders across operations, hiring, GTM support, and special projects. You will own cadence, priorities, and follow-through, ensuring critical tasks move forward while unblocking the founders when needed.

In this high-trust role, you’ll build lightweight processes and use SAGARIS to let agents handle busywork, focusing on strategic calls and high-impact decisions to accelerate company growth.

Qualifications

• Exceptional organization and follow-through in high-ambiguity environments.
• Strong judgment to differentiate what matters and what can wait.
• Clear, fast written communication to coordinate with founders and stakeholders.
• Comfort with broad responsibilities across operations, hiring, GTM support, and internal tooling.

Responsibilities

• Own the operating cadence: planning, priorities, follow-through, and the meetings that make them real.
• Unblock the founders by taking whole problems off their plate and closing them.
• Run special projects end to end, from hiring logistics to GTM support to internal tooling.
• Build lightweight systems and processes an early team needs, and no more than that.
• Use SAGARIS internally: let agents handle busywork; you handle calls that need a human.

Skills

Organization

Judgment

Written communication

Ambiguity tolerance

Ownership mindset

Tools

Light automation tools

Job description

Early companies live or die on execution, and execution lives in the gaps between people. The Founder's Associate is the person who owns those gaps: the cadence, the follow-through, the thousand small decisions that keep a founding team moving fast without dropping things.

This is a high-trust, high-exposure role. You'll work directly with the founders across everything (operations, hiring, GTM support, special projects), and you'll use SAGARIS itself to let agents carry the admin while you carry the judgment. It's the fastest way in the company to learn how the whole thing works.

What you'll do

• Own the operating cadence: planning, priorities, follow-through, and the meetings that make them real.
• Unblock the founders: take whole problems off their plate and close them.
• Run special projects end to end, from hiring logistics to GTM support to internal tooling.
• Build the lightweight systems and processes an early team needs, and no more than that.
• Use SAGARIS internally: let agents handle the busywork; you handle the calls that need a human.

What we're looking for

• You're exceptionally organised and finish what you start, without being chased.
• You've operated in a high-ambiguity, high-ownership environment and thrived.
• Strong judgment: you know what matters, what can wait, and when to elevate.
• Clear, fast written communication.
• You want breadth and proximity to how a company is built, not a narrow lane.

Nice to have

• Startup, founding-team, consulting, or chief-of-staff experience.
• Enough technical comfort to work with modern software tools and light automation.
• A track record of quietly making messy things orderly.

What success looks like

• In 3 months: the founders trust you with whole problems and the operating cadence runs itself.
• In 6 months: several projects have shipped that wouldn't have without you owning them.
• In 12 months: you've grown into an area of real ownership as the company has grown.

Benefits

• Meaningful founding equity, with a real stake in what you help build.
• Top-of-band cash compensation. We don't ask you to trade salary for story.
• Remote-first with deliberate in-person offsites; we optimise for deep work, not attendance.
• A hardware and home-office budget, plus whatever software makes you faster.
• Comprehensive health coverage and a genuinely respected time-off policy.
• Direct access to the founders and an outsized say in the roadmap and the culture.