Associate / Startup Builder

The pitch

You want to start a company. Not someday-maybe — actually.

You could go get a "real job" at a growth-stage startup and learn one function well. Or you could spend the next two or three years doing every job at a profitable SaaS business, shoulder-to-shoulder with the founder, inside the venture studio that's going to help you launch what's next.

 

That's this role.

 

 

 

What Team Engine is

Team Engine is a profitable SaaS platform serving regional service and trades businesses — landscapers, HVAC companies, haulers, manufacturers. We help them hire, communicate with, and retain their workforce, with a heavy AI layer under the hood. A small team of experienced founders, 500+ customers, and actively building the next AI-first hiring platform for businesses of all types. 

Team Engine is operated by Founder Laboratory , a venture studio. The honest pitch here: if you're great, this role grows.

What you'll actually do

A real Tuesday might look like:

• 9am — rebuild a landing page in Webflow because conversion is slumping

• 11am — hop on a discovery call with a 120-employee landscaping company in Georgia

• 1pm — dig into GA4 to figure out why organic traffic dropped last week

• 3pm — pair with an engineer on a new onboarding flow, sketching the user journey in Figma

• 5pm — set up a HubSpot workflow to re-engage churned customers

You will touch sales, marketing, ops, product, and a surprising amount of plumbing. You will close tabs you didn't know existed. You will ship things that immediately affect revenue. You will also do unglamorous work — cleaning data, writing Loom walkthroughs, chasing invoices — because that's the job too.

Who you are

Required:

• AI-forward. You already reach for Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor before you reach for Stack Overflow. If you haven't used Claude Code yet, you'll learn it in week one and be dangerous in a month.

• Technically fluent, not technically trained. You aren’t intimidated by code even if you can’t write it yourself, write SQL-ish queries, poke around a CMS, and debug a broken Zap. 

• You want to start a company. Not as a vague aspiration. As a thing you talk about with friends.

Bonus points:

• You've already tried to start something — a company, a nonprofit, a community, a weird side project that went further than it should have. Former founders go to the top of the pile.

• You've independently built something on the internet that more than ten strangers use.

Probably not a fit if:

• You want a clear job description with stable responsibilities (this role is the opposite of that).

• You want to go deep on one craft.

• You need a manager who plans your week.

Logistics

• Location: Boulder, CO. Mostly remote, but some in-person.

• Salary: $100K–$180K depending on experience, with meaningful upside as the role grows.

• Start: As soon as we find the right person.