FOUNDING GROWTH ENGINEER
Remote in Europe (CET overlap) · Full-time · Reports to both founders · Flappie is based in Switzerland
Three in the morning. Your cat comes through the flap with a mouse in its mouth. Flappie sees the prey, runs recognition directly on the device, and keeps the flap shut. The mouse stays outside. You keep sleeping.
That is the product we sell today. This job is taking it from 3,000 homes to global category leader. All of the growth in between is yours to build.
The real posting, with the prey-detection videos and the application, lives here:
https://flappiedoors.com/pages/founding-growth-engineer
WHERE WE ARE
Three years of building. Over €1 million in pre-sales. More than 3,000 Flappies shipped across Europe. 200+ media features, The Guardian and the Wall Street Journal among them. The batch so far sold out on word of mouth and press alone.
Number of people who have ever owned growth at Flappie: zero. You would be the first. No agency to unwind, no inherited playbook, no predecessor's decisions to defend.
And the flap is the wedge: the one place an outdoor cat passes several times a day, at close range, wearing nothing. Prey detection is what we sell today. Non-invasive insight into cats and their health is where we want to take the company. We keep those two statements separate.
WHAT YOU WILL DO
• Own paid acquisition end to end: Meta Ads and Google Ads accounts, budgets, tracking, creative testing, CAC, and the decision to scale or stop.
• Read customer conversations, reviews, forums, and search data until you understand the language cat owners use before they know Flappie exists.
• Turn that insight into positioning, hooks, creative, landing pages, offers, and controlled experiments.
• Build our SEO and AI-discovery engine: search intent, comparison pages, installation guides, customer proof, and the distribution to match.
• Improve Shopify conversion, lifecycle email, localization, review capture, and referral.
• Test creators, affiliates, customer footage, and partnerships when the evidence says they deserve the time.
• Build one commercial view of orders, contribution margin, and incremental growth that the founders can trust.
• Use agents, automation, APIs, and lightweight code to run all of this at a speed that used to take a small team.
You own the full D2C growth picture. Choosing what not to do is part of the job.
HOW YOU WORK
Roughly 70% growth judgment, 30% technical leverage. The "engineer" in the title describes how you work, not your background. You are a marketer first, one who ships through agents, automation, and code instead of waiting for a team.
AI is for production, not theatre. You check claims, numbers, originality, and quality, and you stay responsible for the output. We already work this way at Flappie. You will not need to convince us that AI matters.
WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR
• You have personally run consumer acquisition at a spend level you had to defend, and you can still reconstruct the economics, the creative decisions, and your own contribution. E-commerce, D2C subscription, consumer app: all real. If it was a physical product, with real margins and real logistics, that is a clear advantage.
• You have built at least one growth asset that kept working after the initial push: SEO, content, lifecycle, creators, referral, community, or something we have not named.
• You have built something of your own. A store, a brand, a product, a small agency, a serious side project. People who build without waiting for permission do well here.
• Fluent English. German is useful, not required. Based in Europe with substantial CET overlap.
DO NOT APPLY IF
• Flappie would be one client among several. This is a full-time seat and the most important hire we make this year. It needs a whole person. Having built things of your own is a strong plus; running several of them alongside this job is not.
• You need a team, a finished brief, or a large budget before you can learn.
• Your AI evidence is a list of tools, your SEO evidence is article volume, or your strongest recent artifact is a strategy deck.
COMPENSATION
Base plus a meaningful performance-linked component. Equity is reserved for a truly exceptional hire. The level depends on your seniority and the evidence you bring. Neither side should invest hours without knowing the fundamentals fit, so we put the realistic range on the table in the very first call.
THE PROCESS: THREE STEPS
1. Founder call, 15 to 20 minutes. Mission, availability, compensation. An introduction, not an interview.
2. Growth working session, 60 to 75 minutes. One result you personally owned, then a real Flappie growth problem, together.
3. Paid work sample. Four hours maximum, paid whether or not we hire you. Your work stays yours.
If everyone wants to continue, we speak to references and make the offer. All three steps fit inside fourteen days, because the goal is a September start. We only hire people who have proven they can build and excel from 0 to 1.
HOW TO APPLY
Skip the cover letter. Show us your numbers. Apply at https://flappiedoors.com/pages/founding-growth-engineer with:
1. One scale case: timeframe, spend, orders, CAC, commercial outcome, and what you personally did. Ranges are fine where confidentiality applies.
2. One compounding-growth case: what you built and what kept working after you stopped pushing.
3. One agentic workflow: what goes in, what the system does, where you intervene, what became faster or better.
4. One thing you built for yourself.
5. One thing that failed, and what it changed about how you work. Plus location, languages, availability.
Use AI. We do, all day. Tell us how you used it and how you checked it. If you cannot back what it tells you, we are not a match.
Applications without numbers or inspectable evidence get no reply. We would rather say that here than take your evening.