Founder's Office (US)

About Dust

Work is being rewritten, and the people holding the pen are the ones who actually run it. We call them AI operators: the employees inside companies who build, deploy, and run AI agents for their teams, without waiting for someone to hand them a tool. Dust is the platform they choose to rewire how their company works.

With 70%+ weekly active users, people stick with Dust as much as they do with Slack and Notion. We don't get piloted and shelved. We land once, and spread. We're at an exciting stage of our journey, and growing fast.

We're serving great customers like Datadog, 1Password, Cursor, Clay, and Persona, and aim to x5 our growth by the end of 2026.

Dust is backed by Sequoia with a determined team of optimists (coming from Stripe, OpenAI, and Stanford) who like to focus on users, ship fast, and don't take themselves too seriously while doing so. The Generalist named us among the Future 50.

Summary

The Founder's Office at Dust exists to increase the operating leverage of the company during a period of hypergrowth.

This role is designed for high-agency problem solvers who want to work on the company's highest-priority initiatives. You'll operate across operations, GTM, recruiting, customer work, partnerships, and strategic projects, stepping into ambiguous situations and driving them forward with speed and judgment.

Some projects may last a day. Others may become entire functions.

You'll work closely with senior leadership, gain unusually high exposure to how a fast-growing AI company operates, and help scale the systems, processes, and decisions that matter most.

This is not a traditional strategy role, and it is not an assistant role. We are looking for people who thrive in ambiguity, move quickly, take ownership naturally, and enjoy building where structure does not yet exist.

What You'll Do

• Own high-priority initiatives that do not yet have a clear long-term owner
• Drive cross-functional projects across operations, GTM, recruiting, partnerships, and customer work
• Identify operational bottlenecks and help resolve them quickly and effectively
• Improve how the company executes by building lightweight systems, processes, and operating cadences
• Help leadership translate priorities and decisions into execution
• Step into ambiguous situations, create structure quickly, and drive momentum
• Operate with high context across the company and connect dots across teams
• Take on increasing scope and ownership as the company scales

Example Projects

Projects may include:

• Launching a new operational or GTM motion
• Supporting strategic customer initiatives
• Improving recruiting and interview operations
• Coordinating executive offsites or field events
• Driving follow-through on company priorities
• Building internal systems that improve execution speed and visibility

Requirements

Every candidate and employee's success is measured against the same 3 dimensions. Aptitude, Attitude and Agency.

Aptitude

• You are highly analytical and structured in how you think
• You can synthesize incomplete information quickly and identify what matters most
• You communicate clearly and concisely, both verbally and in writing
• You learn new domains extremely quickly
• You exercise strong judgment without requiring heavy oversight
• You know how to balance speed and quality appropriately

Attitude

• You are motivated by company-building, not narrowly defined ownership
• You are energized by solving hard problems, especially when the path forward is unclear
• You are equally comfortable thinking strategically and executing tactically
• You have low ego and high curiosity
• You build trust easily across technical and non-technical teams
• You are comfortable operating in fast-moving and ambiguous environments

Agency

• You proactively identify problems and move toward them
• You take ownership without waiting for permission
• You close loops and push work to completion
• You are resourceful under constraints
• You are comfortable making decisions with imperfect information
• You naturally create momentum around you

Ideal Backgrounds

We care far more about slope, judgment, and ownership than any specific background, but strong candidates often come from environments like:

• Early-stage startups
• Founder's Office or Chief of Staff roles
• Consulting paired with meaningful operator experience
• Venture capital or investing roles transitioning into operating
• Business operations or strategic operations
• Former founders or entrepreneurial builders

Why This Role Is Unique

• Exposure to nearly every part of the company
• Opportunity to work on the company's highest-priority initiatives
• Extremely high learning velocity
• Significant autonomy and ownership
• A path toward larger operational or functional leadership roles over time
• A front-row seat to scaling an AI company during a major platform shift

Compensation and Benefits

• Competitive compensation: $175,000 - $200,000 base salary
• Substantial support for relocation (up to 10k€), including finding an apartment in San Francisco and supporting you with the visa procedure
• Significant equity package in a Sequoia-backed startup
• Health insurance for you and your dependents
• New MacBook Pro or Linux machine, monitor, keyboard, etc.
• Beautiful office in San Francisco
• Opportunity to travel to Paris multiple times a year
• Regular team events and offsite

Location

We're prioritizing building our team with an in-person culture at our offices in Paris, San Francisco, and New York because we value the magic that happens when talented people work closely together.

We have an office-first culture. Some of the best things about building at Dust are the energy, the fast decisions, and the unexpected conversations that unlock a hard problem, which happen because we are in the same room. Being together is not a formality, it is how we do our best work, and it is something we actively protect. That said, we hire people with strong judgement and we extend that trust to how they manage their time. When working from home makes more sense for what you need to get done that day, we trust you to make that call.

Why Dust

The models are powerful enough. What's missing is the product layer where AI meets how companies actually work. That's what we're building: the infrastructure that lets any team turn scattered knowledge and tools into coordinated execution with agents they build, own, and run themselves.

We use Dust ourselves every day. We get to shape how humans and agents collaborate while solving our own problems with the product we ship. That loop is rare, and it's why we move fast.

If you're excited about defining a new category and want to join a determined team of optimists who focus on users, ship fast, and don't take themselves too seriously, we'd love to talk.

Even if you don't check every box in our requirements, we encourage you to apply. We value diverse perspectives and backgrounds, and we're more interested in your potential and passion than a perfect match to our checklist.

Learn how we think and work.

• Our product constitution, a story about our mission
• Agents at work - Latent Space, podcast with our cofounder, Stanislas Polu, 2024
• LLMs reasoning and agentic capabilities over time - dotAI, podcast with our cofounder, Stanislas Polu, 2024