Founders Associate

ABOUT ZELARA

Current CRM marketing is broken. It blasts generic messages at scale and calls it "personalization." Our founders lived this problem in leading positions at HelloFresh, Salesforce, Uber, and others. Backed by top-tier VCs, they decided to fix it.

Zelara is an AI lifecycle marketing system that learns from every customer interaction and continuously improves how brands communicate at the individual level. Built on top of existing CRM infrastructure, it replaces static journeys and manual segmentation with a reinforcement learning engine that generates content, makes individual-level decisions, and gets smarter with every outcome.

Enterprise customers already see up to 70% significant conversion lift. We closed one of the largest pre-seed rounds in European SaaS history, are generating revenue with paying enterprise customers, and are seeing strong market pull. Now we are building the team to scale.

THE ROLE

As Founders Associate at Zelara, you will work side by side with our Co-Founders in our Berlin office. This is a high-impact, generalist role at the core of how the company operates. You will take ownership of company operations, financial planning, fundraising, and hiring — the critical building blocks that allow the founding team to focus on product and growth. You will operate with an AI-first mindset, applying technology to solve challenges and accelerate our impact. While you will contribute across the business, your core projects will be aligned with your unique strengths. We encourage candidates with strong analytical or operational backgrounds to apply, as the role will be shaped to leverage your expertise in building Zelara.

What You Will Do

• Own company operations: structure internal processes and keep the founding team organized and focused.

• Build and maintain financial models — forecasts, scenario planning, unit economics.

• Lead grant and funding applications from research through submission.

• Drive hiring end-to-end: define roles, source candidates, manage pipelines, and build the foundations of our talent strategy.

• Develop data-driven narratives and materials to support internal reporting, investor relations, and future fundraising.

• Over time, help translate user feedback and AI research into product insights that influence the development roadmap.

YOUR DAY-TO-DAY

Your work will be dynamic and tied to the founders' priorities. No two days will be the same. You will solve every task with an AI-first approach. One day you might build a financial scenario model for a board discussion. The next, you could be drafting a grant application, structuring an interview process for a key hire, or preparing materials for an investor update.

YOUR FIRST 90 DAYS

30 Days (Immersion): You will immerse yourself in Zelara's product, technology, and market. You will learn about our customers, support the founding team in daily operations, and take ownership of your first key project.

60 Days (Ownership): You will own significant projects from start to finish — whether that is building a financial model, driving a hiring process, or structuring a funding application. You will contribute directly to major workstreams across operations and finance.

90 Days (Impact): You will operate with full autonomy as a strategic partner to the founders. You will proactively identify opportunities, use data to propose solutions, and drive initiatives that shape the company's direction.

WHO YOU ARE

• You have an AI-first mindset, constantly seeking ways to leverage technology.

• You have experience in a high-performance environment, such as a technology startup, venture capital, or management consulting.

• You have demonstrated analytical ability through activities such as building financial models, conducting market sizing, or using data to drive business decisions.

• You have a track record of navigating ambiguity and delivering results on complex projects with minimal guidance.

• You are an effective communicator who can convey complex ideas clearly and concisely.

• You are fluent in both German and English.

• You demonstrate high ownership of your work.
  

WHAT WE OFFER

• Direct mentorship from experienced founders who have successfully built and sold AI-driven SaaS businesses and have firsthand experience with our customers' challenges from their leadership roles at global B2C enterprises.

• An accelerator for a future founder or C-level operator, with a clear development path toward a leadership position as the company scales.

• Significant autonomy and ownership of critical business initiatives from the start.

• An AI-native work environment with a personal budget for learning and development to ensure a steep learning curve.

• A competitive salary and a meaningful equity stake, reflecting your role as a key partner in our early growth.

• A Deutschlandticket and a gym/fitness club membership.
  

HOW WE WORK

We are an AI-first team. That means more than using copilots. We embrace spec-driven workflows and AI-assisted execution across engineering and go-to-market. We adopt what makes us faster and discard what doesn't. We use data and intellectual honesty to find the best solutions — and we execute with urgency. We have no patience for process theater or mistaking activity for progress.

If you want to push the boundaries of how companies are built — not just what gets built — you will fit right in.

OUR COMPASS

We are guided by four core values:

• Seek Truth: We ground decisions in evidence. When the facts change, we change our mind.

• Act with Integrity: We build trust through transparency, reliability, and ownership.

• Put Customers First: We succeed only when they succeed.

• Accelerate Impact: We prefer speed, simplicity, and real learning over ceremony.