Operations Associate | A-Players

A-Players is a bootstrapped talent and management company: $2M ARR, 8+ years in market, profitable & impact-driven.

We place vetted, trained Business Associates with early-stage US tech startups (Seed to Series A) and run C-Level, Leadership, and Engineering searches for the same kind of founders.

Today that is 50+ associates working with startup teams in New York, San Francisco, and across North America, and a core team of 10 behind them. Operations today is two people, and the daily flow no longer fits in two calendars. We’re adding a third seat. You take over that flow and make it yours.

The role

You’d join as an Ops Associate. It’s a junior role, and we expect you to grow out of it.

For the first weeks you are the helper: you learn how we run things and run them exactly that way. Once the base is yours, you pick your own projects, and if you’re ready for that sooner than we planned, we’ll make room for it.

Growth here is horizontal as much as vertical: when you find the thing you want to do next, we look for a place for it - something most startups our size can’t offer.

From day one, you work inside the environment of US product companies, the tools, the approaches, and the pace they actually run at, with founders on the other end of the process. Our hires have gone to Reddit, Restream, Unstoppable Domains, GRAI, and Poolday, among others, and two companies we hired for at pre-seed are now unicorns. You see how they are run from the inside, not from a newsletter.

The first year is in Ops. After that, we talk.

What you’ll own

Four blocks. You start on the first two with written procedures and the Operations & Systems Lead next to you, and add the other two as you settle in.

1. Associate servicing. Everything that keeps 50+ associates paid, documented and looked after.

• Offers, NDAs, and the match paperwork for every new associate

• Reference checks, including the follow-ups when a referee goes quiet

• Monthly invoices from 50+ associates: collecting them, checking them against the roster, chasing the late ones, preparing the payroll calculation

• The records: time off, work anniversaries, and events in Airtable, access requests, and confirmation letters

• Day-to-day questions from the associates about any of the above

2. Team and people admin. The part of ops people actually notice.

• Birthday and anniversary gifts, get-well and well-being boxes, for associates and the core team

• Fun meets and team meetups: the idea, the prep, the logistics

• Business trips and offsites, from flights and housing to the budget

• Job posts, links, and interview calendars for our own hiring

• Accounts, invites, and kit for new core-team members; merch when it comes

3. Requests from the Head of Operations. Research and groundwork need a careful pair of hands.

• Pricing a tool or a service, testing it, and writing up what you found

• Pulling internal information together into one clean doc or table

• Formatting and proofreading before something goes to the team

• Finance groundwork (prep only, no judgment)

4. Ad hoc requests from the team. Small, varied, and each one seen through to the end.

• Researching a new service or vendor

• Tidying up fields in one of our systems

• Putting together a quick team survey and the summary after it

• Whatever else lands in ops@ and Slack: you triage it, do it, escalate it, or park it, and say which

A lot of this is careful, repetitive work. AI takes some of it off your hands, but you still check everything it gives you. Most weeks are steady. The last days of the month are not: 60+ invoices land at once and every one of them gets checked.

We genuinely enjoy it, and we hope you will too.

First weeks and months

Your first 90 days

• Week 1: You shadow the Ops Team and learn our procedures.

• Week 2: You take small tasks with feedback on each one.

• Week 3: You run your first handed-over blocks (associate servicing, team admin) under our procedures and take ad hoc asks from the team.

• End of month 2: You bring your first proposals to improve or automate the processes you run.

• End of month 3: You own your blocks and answer most questions yourself.

Who we’re looking for

A junior generalist, and we mean it. This is a new role that replaces nobody, and your CV matters less to us than the way you work. Most of the skills can be junior. One thing has to be exceptional, not just good. Pick yours:

• You learn extremely fast and pick up context from half a sentence.

• You are genuinely strong with AI or technical tools.

• You have real commercial experience (contracts, invoices, clients, e-signature), even a year of it.

Whichever spike you bring, you’ll probably like it here if:

• You notice when a date is wrong or an invoice doesn’t add up. You read the small print, and you remember it.

• A voice note and three scattered messages are enough for you to write a clear task. Nothing has to be repeated or connected for you.

• You use AI every day for your own learning and projects, and you know what a decent prompt looks like.

• You plan your own day, defend your queue, and speak up early when something looks off.

• When plans change, you adjust without losing the thread.

• Your English is good enough to read anything we use and write to anyone directly.

• You are fine with long, careful, repetitive work. Even with AI there is a lot to verify, collect, and put in order. If you need fast context switches, lots of calls or events to feel alive, this is the wrong seat.

You don’t need to know our tools. If you’ve used any CRM, database or banking app at work, you’ll learn Airtable, Brex, TeamTailor and Copper quickly.

It’s an advantage if you’ve been an assistant to a founder, done ops in a startup or an agency, worked in finance or people ops, or anywhere close to IT and product.

What we offer

Let’s get the expected part out of the way first. Remote, full-time, from Ukraine or anywhere in Europe - we’ve been remote since 2018, so there’s no office anyone can summon you to. A fixed schedule in European time, agreed at the start: it can lean toward the evening, it has to overlap with the team calls, and within your hours you’re reachable - a reply within an hour or two, not the next morning. Flexible, with frames. Unlimited time off, agreed in advance - and people actually take it.

That’s the part you’d expect. Here’s what we think you’re actually signing up for:

• A seat inside the US startup world, without moving anywhere. From day one you work with founders backed by YC, a16z, and Khosla Ventures - in their tools, at their pace.

• Growth that’s a plan, not a poster. You join junior, and we expect you to grow out of the role: first you run our procedures, then you pick your own projects - and if you’re ready sooner than we planned, we make room. Horizontal counts as much as vertical.

• An AI-first ops team to learn from. Every AI and productivity tool we use is paid for, plus our internal library of playbooks and templates - you learn on real workflows, not on trial accounts, and by month two you’re already proposing your own automations. It’s in the plan above.

• Team trips and offsites. The next one is being planned, and that may well be your first project.

• A team of 10 that likes working together - and after 8 years, that’s not luck.

How we hire

1. A call with the Head of Operations, your future manager (60 min).

2. A 30-minute live working session: one small task, done together, with AI on the screen.

3. A 30-45 min call with the Operations & Systems Lead: one concrete check on a real case.

4. A culture conversation with leadership (30 min).

5. A paid trial week: five days, full-time, real and realistic tasks under our procedures, a plan in the morning and a status at the end of the day. This is where we see your work, so there is no separate take-home test.

Along the way we look at the things from “Who we’re looking for”: what you do with a messy brief, how carefully you check AI’s work, how you handle a real process. Decisions are fast, sometimes the same day. If it’s a match, you’ll hear right away. If it’s not, we’ll tell you straight. Probation is three months and closes early when the results are there. The seat opens as soon as we find you: December 2026 or early January 2027.

Before you apply, skip the formal cover letter. Tell us what kind of work makes you lose track of time, or something you’ve organized that you’re proud of. A few honest lines are plenty.