Founding Business Operations

ABOUT PHONIC

Phonic is the speech-to-speech model company. Our mission is to make speaking with agents delightful, and we believe that requires models that hear and answer in native audio. To make that possible in production, we work on every layer of the stack: data, pre-training, post-training, kernels, and infrastructure. We’ve raised over $30M from top-tier investors, including First Round, Lux Capital, and Felicis. Our models power voice agents on six continents for companies like Ashby, Maven AGI, and a Fortune 50 IT infrastructure company, handling everything from customer support and patient intake to recruiting interviews and dispatch.

ABOUT THE TEAM

We’re a small team of researchers and engineers from MosaicML, Citadel, Genesis Therapeutics, MIT, Stanford, and CMU, including former founders, an IMO medalist, and an International Linguistics Olympiad medalist. We work in person in San Francisco five days a week. Everything we build across research, product, and infrastructure is in service of our customers. We all own our work end to end and constantly push each other to deliver world-class models and product experiences.

THE ROLE

As the first member of our business operations team, you’ll work directly with our founders on whatever matters most that week. That might mean getting a customer’s voice agent live, coming up with and executing a new go-to-market strategy, or building a dashboard to track how each account is doing.

An intense, high-agency, curious, low-ego jack-of-all-trades will thrive here. You’ll have the opportunity to see how every part of a frontier AI company works and solve new problems every week across the business: sales, marketing, customer success, deployments, pricing, partnerships, and more. We don’t expect you to be highly technical, but you’ll be technical enough to get hands-on and quick to figure out the rest with AI tools. Over time, you’ll likely find the part of the business you enjoy most and go deeper there; we’ll figure out what that is together. Title and compensation are flexible for the right person.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

The role is built to be dynamic, so expect it to evolve with the needs of the business and your own interests. That said, here’s where we expect you to start.

• Go-to-market: Develop and test go-to-market strategies, from outbound to marketing, to reach teams building voice agents
• Deployments: Work with prospects to scope pilots and shape pricing; keep each implementation on track, pulling in engineers when needed and QA’ing agents until they beat alternatives
• Customer success: Track every account’s usage, call quality, and risks, and step in where customers need a hand
• Product: Turn what you hear from customers into product feedback for engineering and research
• And more: Take on projects nobody owns yet across finance, legal, ops, and hiring

WHAT YOU’LL BRING

• 1-5 years at a high-growth startup, in strategy and operations, consulting, banking, or investing
• A strong academic record from a top university
• High velocity and high ownership: you thrive in environments where the playbook is being written
• Extreme organization: you run many threads at once, follow up without being asked, and close every loop
• Clear, concise writing and the presence to lead calls with developers, customers, and partners

NICE TO HAVE

• A technical degree (CS, engineering, math, or similar)
• Founder or early-employee experience
• A track record of starting things on your own, like a side project, small business, or community
• Familiarity with real-time streaming, telephony, or conversational AI platforms
• Experience running growth, go-to-market, or pricing experiments

BENEFITS

• 💸 Top-tier compensation: in order to get the best talent, we provide salary and equity that recognize your skillset
• 🥗 Meals: free breakfast, lunch, and dinner provided in the office
• 🩺 Healthcare: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision
• 🤝 We have regular off-sites and team celebrations
• 👵 401(k) – Let us help you plan for the future