🧭 Founder’s Associate & Operations Lead - Founding Team

About us

Kalmus Labs is building Remora, an AI-native learning platform designed to transform books, documents, and information into interactive, adaptive experiences people genuinely want to spend time with.

We’re combining AI, education, storytelling, design, personality, and technology to create something that feels less like traditional software and more like an environment for learning, thinking, and discovery.

We’re still a small team. That means the people joining now are not stepping into a finished machine, they will help shape the product, the company, and the way people first discover and understand Remora.

About the role

This is a difficult role to describe with one traditional job title.

We’re looking for someone who can become a high-trust operational partner to the founder and help turn plans, conversations, ideas, and decisions into consistent execution across the company.

This is not a traditional executive assistant role, and it is not simply project management.

You’ll work across product, engineering, design, recruiting, operations, launches, and whatever else becomes important as the company grows.

A large part of the role is making sure things actually move.

What was agreed?

Who owns it?

What is blocking it?

What is the realistic deadline?

Did it get finished?

If not, why?

What needs the founder’s attention, and what can be solved without him?

You’ll help maintain the connection between the company’s roadmap and the actual work happening every day.

Some days you may be reviewing the roadmap and following up with five different team members.

Some days you may be sourcing candidates, organizing interviews, preparing a document, writing an email, researching a problem, or turning a messy discussion into a clear action plan.

And some days something unexpected will happen and you’ll simply help figure out what needs to happen next.

The goal is simple: reduce organizational chaos, increase accountability, and give the founder more time to focus on the work that genuinely requires him.

What you’ll do

• Work directly with the founder on priorities, roadmap, execution, and company operations.
• Turn high-level goals and discussions into clear tasks, owners, priorities, and realistic deadlines.
• Track ongoing work across engineering, design, creative, PR/growth, QA, and other teams.
• Follow up with team members proactively instead of waiting for problems to become emergencies.
• Identify blockers, delays, dependencies, and unclear ownership early.
• Maintain a clear picture of what is being worked on, what is complete, what is late, and what needs attention.
• Prepare concise updates for the founder so he does not need to personally chase every task.
• Help run planning, coordination, and follow-up around team meetings.
• Keep roadmaps, task systems, internal documents, and priorities organized and current.
• Challenge unrealistic timelines and help establish deadlines that are ambitious but actually achievable.
• Help source candidates for open roles and identify people who may fit the team.
• Organize candidate pipelines, outreach, scheduling, and interview preparation.
• Research people, companies, tools, competitors, opportunities, or problems when needed.
• Draft emails, messages, briefs, internal documents, job posts, and other operational material.
• Help coordinate onboarding for new contributors.
• Make sure important decisions do not disappear inside chats or meetings.
• Create lightweight processes when they solve a real problem, without adding unnecessary bureaucracy.
• Use AI extensively for research, writing, organization, analysis, recruiting, documentation, and workflow automation.
• Gradually take ownership of more operational responsibilities as trust and context grow.

You might be a good fit if you:

• are unusually organized without becoming bureaucratic;
• naturally notice when something has no owner, no deadline, or no clear next step;
• are comfortable asking people direct questions such as “When will this actually be finished?”;
• can be persistent without becoming unpleasant;
• communicate clearly and concisely;
• can understand complex discussions even when you are not the technical expert in the room;
• learn new subjects quickly;
• are comfortable moving between completely different kinds of work;
• take ownership instead of saying “that isn’t my job”;
• can take a messy situation and turn it into something structured;
• are willing to challenge the founder when something does not make sense;
• can distinguish something genuinely urgent from something merely noisy;
• are good at finding information and figuring things out independently;
• care about execution, not just planning;
• can handle repetitive operational work when it is necessary;
• are trustworthy with sensitive company information;
• are comfortable working closely with a founder in an early-stage environment where priorities can evolve quickly;
• enjoy helping a team become more effective rather than needing to personally receive credit for every result.

You do not need to already have been a Chief of Staff, startup operator, recruiter, or project manager.

We care much more about judgment, reliability, initiative, intelligence, communication, and your ability to make things happen.

Bonus points if you have experience with

• startups or early-stage companies;
• founder support / Founder’s Associate roles;
• product operations;
• project or program management;
• recruiting and candidate sourcing;
• technical teams;
• software development workflows;
• Trello, Linear, Jira, Notion, Slack, GitHub, or similar tools;
• writing and documentation;
• research;
• operations;
• process improvement;
• coordinating remote teams;
• AI-assisted workflows and automation;
• building systems from scratch.

Work style

Remote.
Approximately 15–20 hours per week.
Highly flexible schedule - work when it fits your life, rather than following a fixed daily timetable.
Designed to be compatible with university, another job, freelance work, or other commitments.
We care much more about ownership, responsiveness, communication, and consistent output than about when during the day you work.
Small, highly collaborative team.
Direct access to the founder.
Fast iteration.
High ownership.
Significant autonomy as trust develops.
Very little bureaucracy.

This role does require somewhat more communication and responsiveness than some of our other positions because you will often be coordinating between people. You will still control your schedule, but you should be comfortable checking in regularly and helping keep work moving.

We are early enough that there will not always be an established process to follow. Often, part of your job will be figuring out what the process should be - or deciding that we do not need one at all.

Compensation

Equity-first role - Pre-Seed stage

Target equity: ~3%

4-year vesting / 1-year cliff.

We want to be completely transparent: we do not currently have meaningful cash compensation available for this role, because this is a self-starting startup.

This is only a fit for someone who genuinely wants to help build a company from an early stage and is comfortable accepting real startup risk in exchange for meaningful ownership.

There are no guarantees in startups.

The goal, as Kalmus Labs grows, generates revenue, or raises funding, is to transition strong contributors into paid long-term positions as soon as possible.

We are not looking for someone who feels pressured to work for free. We are looking for someone for whom this particular risk/reward tradeoff genuinely makes sense alongside other work/school/personal commitments.

Because this role works closely with the founder and touches many parts of the company, there is significant room for the position to grow over time - potentially toward broader operations, product operations, Chief of Staff, or another leadership path depending on the person.

How to apply

📩 Send us:

• LinkedIn / resume / relevant profile;
• anything you’ve organized, managed, built, coordinated, researched, or helped move forward;
• examples of startup, university, community, project, recruiting, operations, or leadership work if you have them;
• and a few honest sentences answering:

Imagine you join a seven-person startup. Everyone is working remotely, several important tasks are overdue, the founder is personally chasing everyone, and nobody has a completely accurate picture of what is blocked. What would you do during your first week?

Send to: [email protected]

Please avoid AI-generated essays or generic corporate applications. One truthful sentence is worth more than a couple of AI-written abstracts.

Using AI is completely fine - we use it constantly ourselves. But we want to see how you think, prioritize, communicate, and solve problems, not how well an AI can write an application for you.

🌐 kalmuslabs.com (soon to be updated)