Founder's Office

Zapdos Labs turns the cameras factories already own into working systems. Every plant has twenty to sixty cameras that record everything and nobody watches. We put vision AI on those cameras and connect it to the plant's real work.

We have paying customers in Texas and Asia. Our work spans Fortune 100 companies and defense. We are VC-backed and scaling fast. We are Eleven labs Grant recipients, Nebius Cloud global hackathon winners, and Top 60 at Slingshot 2025.

We are hiring a Founder's Associate to work directly with the founder across every part of running and scaling the company. This is a highly transversal role with broad exposure to sales, strategy, product, operations and finance in a company that sells to factory floors, not software teams.

It is an exceptional opportunity to learn how an industrial AI company is built from the inside, and to grow into a leadership role as it scales.

What You'll Do

• Partner directly with the founder on the highest-leverage problems across the company, spanning go-to-market, product, strategy, operations, finance and hiring.
• Own ambiguous, high-impact projects end-to-end. One month you might reshape our pilot pricing, run discovery on a new industry vertical, prepare the launch of a new vision workflow, or rethink our positioning from customer calls and market research.
• Help define how Zapdos grows by researching markets, ideal customers, competitors, plant-floor pain points, and what is changing in vision AI and industrial software.
• Run the sales engine's operating layer: lead lists, outbound sequences, cold-calling reporting, CRM hygiene, follow-ups and pilot proposals, so the founder's time goes to customer conversations.
• Work closely with engineering, sales and content to turn strategy into execution and make sure the biggest priorities actually ship each week.
• Build AI-powered systems, automations and internal tools that let Zapdos scale across two continents without adding operational overhead.
• Lead company-wide initiatives such as the US and Asia operating cadence, hiring workflows, grants and programme applications, certifications, compliance and internal tooling.
• Own and continuously improve core business operations across two entities, including finance, legal, billing, contracts, vendor management and investor reporting.
• Act as an extension of the founder, working on whatever matters most to building Zapdos into the company that defines its category.

Who You Are

• You want to become a founder one day, or you're excited to help build a company from the inside and grow into a key leadership role.
• You have a technical background and are comfortable writing code, working with APIs and building automations. You're likely an engineer by training or experience.
• You use AI extensively to research, write, analyse, prototype and automate your work, and are constantly looking for ways to increase your leverage. Claude Code, Cursor and similar are part of how we work, not a bonus.
• You're fascinated by startups, industrial operations, computer vision and AI, and naturally enjoy understanding products, markets, customers and company strategy.
• You're exceptionally analytical, structured and able to quickly learn unfamiliar domains, whether that's pricing, legal, finance, compliance, grants or go-to-market.
• You're comfortable owning ambiguous problems without a playbook and driving them through to completion.
• You communicate clearly, think independently and earn trust with engineers, plant managers and investors alike.
• You're willing to stand on a factory floor. Customer sites are a 40-minute drive and you'll visit them.
• Bonus: you've been a founder, an early startup employee, worked in manufacturing, logistics or industrial operations, or have experience in a fast-growing B2B company selling to operators.

How We Work

Autonomy measured in deliverables, not hours. Nobody asks when you logged on. Everyone sees what shipped this week. Zero layers between you, the founder, and the customers.

Location

This is an hybrid/ in-person role in Austin, TX with the opportunity to live in our 3-storey hacker house, where the team lives and builds under one roof.

• Apply on LinkedIn or message us directly at [Confidential Information]