Founder's Associate, Operations
Founder's Associate — Operations
Location: Berlin Mitte, on-site | Type: Full time, permanent | Reports to: CEO | Range: €50,000–65,000 | Languages: German native + English | Experience: 0–3 years
A company of six that is about to become a company of twenty runs on a set of things nobody owns yet. Invoicing and the tax advisor. ISO 27001 evidence. KRITIS registrations. The R&D tax credit application. The data room. Onboarding fifteen people. Two trade fairs in the same week in Essen. The CRM staying honest enough that the pipeline number means something.
This role owns that. Not as an assistant — as the person who builds the operating system underneath a company scaling faster than its processes. You will spend your first year doing an unreasonable variety of things, most of them for the first time, most of them with a real deadline attached.
It is the job that produces founders and operators. It is also the job where you will be told on a Tuesday that a tender response is due Friday and there is no template. If that reads as a problem rather than the appeal, this is the wrong posting.
What You'll Own
Business operations. Invoicing, supplier contracts, the interface to the tax advisor and the bookkeeper, keeping the runway model current, the monthly numbers the founders look at.
Compliance administration. ISO 27001 evidence collection with our external partner, KRITIS registrations, the R&D tax credit filing, insurance and registry housekeeping. You will not be the expert; you will be the reason none of it slips.
People operations. Fifteen hires are coming. Offers, contracts, onboarding, equipment, the profit participation paperwork, making someone's first week feel like it was planned.
Systems and tooling. CRM hygiene, the knowledge base, the applicant tracking system, the internal documentation that stops the same question being asked four times.
Whatever is on fire. Trade fair logistics, a tender deadline, an investor data room, a customer site visit that needs organising. This is a real part of the role, not a footnote.
Your First Six Months
Month 1 — You own invoicing, supplier admin and the tax-advisor interface outright. Nothing in that lane comes back to a founder.
Month 2–3 — Onboarding runs to a checklist you wrote. The compliance calendar exists and has owners and dates on it. Trade fair logistics for the autumn are handled without a founder touching a hotel booking.
Month 4–6 — You are running the monthly operating rhythm — numbers, hiring pipeline, compliance status — and the CEO's week has visibly more room in it for customers and investors.
What We're Looking For
Zero to three years in. Strong degree, or a first stint in consulting, banking, or an early-stage company. What matters is that you finish things.
Unusually organised, and comfortable being the person who chases other people — including the founders — until something is done.
Numerate and fluent in spreadsheets. You should be able to build a model, not only read one.
German at native level and confident written English. A lot of this role is German administrative correspondence; a lot of the rest is not.
Discreet. You will see the cap table, salaries and the pipeline in the same week.
Nice to Have
You have worked with a German tax advisor, a Steuerberater portal, or DATEV before.
You automate the boring parts instead of doing them twice.
Interest in the domain — infrastructure, security, energy — rather than in startups generally.
About Spine
Spine is the observability layer for critical infrastructure. We are a Berlin hardware and software team building sensors, mesh networks and correlation platforms for transmission operators, rail operators and institutional security teams.
Our towers combine camera, radar, radio-frequency and acoustic sensing with processing at the edge, and our software turns what they see into a small number of alerts a person can act on. We design and build the hardware ourselves, in Berlin, and the platform that runs on it. Customers own their towers; we run the intelligence.
The work matters because the infrastructure Europe depends on is being tested, and the people responsible for protecting it are working with tools built for a different decade. Securing European prosperity is the reason the company exists, and it is not a slogan we picked afterwards.
What We Offer
Profit participation for every employee. A real programme with a defined pool, not a gesture. You share in what the company becomes worth.
The stated salary range, and a conversation about where you land in it rather than a negotiation game.
Berlin Mitte, on site. Sophienstraße, with the hardware in the building. We are not a remote company and we would rather say so than waste your time.
Direct access. Six people today. Whatever you build here will be visible, attributable and yours.
German and English. Engineering runs in English, customers run in German, and both are normal here.
25 days of holiday, and a company that means it when the year is over.
How the Process Runs
An intro call with the founder you would work with, a deep-dive on your experience, a practical exercise drawn from something real we are working on — no take-home longer than three hours — a conversation with the wider team, and references. Four steps, normally inside three weeks, and you will hear back either way.
We hire for what you can do rather than where you did it. If you meet most of a posting and not all of it, apply anyway and tell us which part you would need to grow into.