Founding Growth

San Francisco, CA
5 days in office
$100K-$130K base + competitive equity

We’re partnering with a stealth, venture-backed AI consumer startup that is rethinking how people form meaningful romantic connections.

Rather than building another swipe-based dating app, the company uses conversational AI to understand users at a much deeper level, identify compatible matches, and help move those connections toward real-world dates.

The company sits at the intersection of AI, consumer technology, marketplaces, and lifestyle branding. It has already grown to more than 10,000 users in San Francisco and is now entering its next stage of expansion, launching city by city across the U.S.

The team is approximately 18 people, engineering-heavy, and based in Cow Hollow, San Francisco. The company has raised approximately $10M in seed funding from leading consumer and technology investors and includes experienced talent from companies such as Uber, Uber Eats, and Afterpay.

They are now hiring a Founding Growth operator to work directly with the co-founder and help turn their early GTM motion into a repeatable national growth engine.

The Opportunity

This is not a traditional strategy role.

The team is looking for someone who can take an idea, turn it into an operating plan, execute it, measure it, and then build the systems needed to repeat it.

The company already has meaningful traction in San Francisco and the beginnings of a successful GTM motion. The next challenge is operationalizing that motion so it can be deployed efficiently in San Diego, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and future markets.

You will sit at the center of that effort.

You’ll work directly with the co-founder to organize the GTM function across city launches, partnerships, creators, budgets, timelines, growth metrics, digital acquisition, and on-the-ground consumer marketing.

The ideal person combines two qualities that do not always come together: strong systems-level and analytical thinking, and genuine excitement about creative consumer growth.

What You’ll Own

You’ll help build, refine, and operationalize a repeatable GTM playbook for launching new cities.

That will include:

• Owning city-launch planning and execution
• Organizing budgets, timelines, priorities, owners, and dependencies
• Building and managing partnerships
• Managing or overseeing UGC creators and creator programs
• Coordinating digital and offline growth initiatives
• Supporting creative campaigns and local-market activations
• Tracking acquisition, growth, and city-level performance metrics
• Analyzing performance and determining what should be scaled, changed, or discontinued
• Building dashboards, operating cadences, and systems that make growth easier to manage
• Translating creative growth ideas into executable plans
• Developing increasingly repeatable and efficient launch processes
• Working closely with product, engineering, creative, and leadership
• Identifying unconventional ways to drive consumer awareness and acquisition
• Traveling with the team for approximately 2-3 week launch sprints in new markets

The goal is not simply to execute one successful city launch. It is to help build the operating system that allows the company to launch the next five, ten, and eventually many more cities.

What They’re Looking For

The ideal candidate has approximately 2-10 years of experience across growth, GTM, or growth operations, although the team is open to stronger or more experienced candidates who still want to operate as hands-on individual contributors.

You should have experience in a startup environment where you have been responsible for actually executing growth initiatives, not simply recommending them.

The strongest backgrounds will likely include:

• Growth or GTM experience at an early-stage startup
• Experience at a Series A or Series B consumer company, or another business that went through a significant hypergrowth period
• Consumer technology, marketplace, mobile, or consumer-brand experience
• Ownership of meaningful growth initiatives from beginning to end
• Experience operationalizing GTM or growth strategies
• Experience coordinating budgets, timelines, partnerships, creators, campaigns, or market launches
• Strong GTM strategy and execution capabilities
• Strong analytical skills and comfort working with growth metrics
• Experience with data analysis and operational modeling
• Strong consumer marketing and creative instincts
• Ability to build structure in situations where very little structure currently exists
• Strong project-management and organizational skills
• Ability to move quickly without waiting for perfect information
• A strong bias toward action, experimentation, and shipping
• Comfort working alongside highly technical teams
• Ability to balance creative thinking with structured execution
• Comfort operating independently without a detailed playbook
• Experience in an early-stage startup, consulting, or investment banking environment can be valuable when paired with direct growth experience
• Strong academic background, with a degree from a top-tier university preferred

Founding Growth experience or growth experience at a company that has gone through a particularly strong period of scaling is a major plus. During calibration, the hiring team specifically highlighted this type of background as particularly compelling.

What This Role Is Not

This is not a traditional sales or business-development role.

The company is not looking for an AE, SDR, or someone whose primary experience is carrying a sales quota.

It is also not looking for someone who has spent their career exclusively building strategy decks while other teams execute the work.

Pure product operations backgrounds without meaningful GTM ownership are less relevant, as are candidates who are highly analytical but do not naturally move from analysis into execution.

The right person will be comfortable being both the person who creates structure and the person who gets things done.

What Success Looks Like

One of the biggest objectives during the first 90 days will be helping turn the company’s current GTM approach into a repeatable, scalable operating playbook.

You will not be starting from zero.

The company already has more than 10,000 users in its first market, early growth data, existing experiments, partnerships, creative strategies, and an initial launch framework.

The opportunity is to take those pieces and make the entire system more organized, measurable, efficient, and repeatable.

As the company enters each new city, the process should become faster and smarter.

Culture

The company operates in person five days per week from its Cow Hollow office in San Francisco.

The team is small, highly collaborative, engineering-heavy, social, and fast-moving. There is a high degree of autonomy and ownership, and people are expected to identify what needs to happen rather than wait for detailed instructions.

Because the company is building a consumer lifestyle product, the culture combines technical intensity with a strong social and creative component.

Team traditions and benefits include free lunch and dinner, coffee and snacks, team off-sites, rooftop cocktail nights, launch trips, a beautiful office space, and an office dog.

Compensation and Logistics

Base salary: $100K-$130K, with potential flexibility for exceptional candidates

Equity: Competitive startup equity

Location: Cow Hollow, San Francisco

Work model: Five days per week in office

Travel: Approximately 2-3 week launch sprints in new U.S. cities

Employment: Full-time

Visa: Open to qualifying visa transfers, with potential sponsorship flexibility for the right candidate

Hiring count: Approximately 1-2 hires

Reporting: Directly to the co-founder

Interview Process

The process is expected to include:
1. Intro call
2. GTM screen
3. Founder conversation
4. Short work trial

The team is moving quickly and is open to accelerating the process for exceptional candidates.

This is a strong opportunity for someone who wants to join before the growth engine is fully built, take meaningful ownership of how a consumer company expands nationally, and eventually be able to point to the GTM system and say, “I helped build that.”