Founder’s Associate

Part-time / fractional to start

Singapore / remote

Shelley Labs is looking for a Founder’s Associate / Strategic Operations Lead to work closely with the founder across research, partnerships, funding, programme development, and internal operations.

Shelley works on data governance, digital sovereignty, distributed infrastructure, and new institutional models for governing data and shared digital resources. Current work includes data trusts and commons, agricultural data governance in Southeast Asia, privacy-preserving computation, federated systems, provenance, and alternative models of data ownership and value-sharing.

The role is broad by design. The priority is to help turn active research, partnerships, and opportunities into structured workstreams and follow-through.

Responsibilities

• Coordinate active projects, partnerships, grants, research, and external commitments
• Turn meetings and exploratory conversations into clear next steps, timelines, and deliverables
• Prepare briefs, notes, proposals, decks, and partnership materials
• Support grant and funding applications
• Maintain partner, funder, and opportunity pipelines
• Conduct targeted research across policy, law, technology, development, and finance
• Track decisions, dependencies, and follow-ups across multiple workstreams
• Help build lightweight internal systems for project and knowledge management
• Support the development of Shelley’s data trust and data commons programmes

Profile

This role would suit someone with experience in one or more of:

• public policy
• technology policy
• law
• research
• international development
• consulting
• climate, finance, or emerging technology

You do not need a technical background, but you should be comfortable working with technical concepts.

The main requirements are strong writing, sound judgment, intellectual range, and the ability to work independently in an early-stage environment.

You should be able to take an ambiguous problem, work out what matters, and move it forward without requiring detailed instructions.

Working arrangement

The role will initially be part-time or fractional, around 2–3 days per week, with scope to expand.

Remote candidates are welcome. Some overlap with Singapore working hours will be useful.

Compensation will depend on experience, location, and working arrangement.

Application

Please send:

• your CV and LinkedIn profile
• a covering letter describing what drives you, why Shelley’s work interests you, and why you think you’d be a good fit for this kind of role.
• your location and availability

Send applications to liyana@helloshelley.com with the subject line:

Founder’s Associate — [Name]

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.