Founders Associate

Location: London, with daily overlap into US Central hours and regular travel to Texas

Type: Full time

Role Overview

Civic Marketplace is an AI native cooperative procurement platform for US local government. Public procurement is one of the largest, least modernised workflows in the public sector. Our agentic workflows help agencies discover, evaluate and engage suppliers faster, and open public sector opportunities to more businesses.

We are looking for a Founders Associate to work directly with the CEO: taking the company's most important cross functional problems, putting structure around them, and running them to completion with a team eight hours away.

Why Civic Marketplace

This is a seat at the centre of a company building category defining infrastructure for how government buys. The market is large, under contested and moving fast toward AI. You will see every part of the business, work directly with the founders, investors and our government partners, and own outcomes rather than support someone else who does.

About the Role

This is an owner's role, not a chief of staff in the scheduling sense. You will take two or three company priorities a quarter off the CEO's desk and run them end to end. Al is based in the UK and most of the team and our partners are in US Central, so you will open workstreams with Al in the UK morning and run them with the US team through their day.

You will:

• Own flagship programmes end to end: for example our solicitation sourcing programme with a cooperative partner, designing the process and the AI tooling around it and running it to the outcome.

• Bring structure to ambiguous questions: turn a half formed question from the CEO, the board or a partner into a framed problem with options and a recommendation, usually within a day.

• Run the operating rhythm: leadership syncs, board and investor updates, OKR reviews and the all hands, so decisions get made and then get done.

• Represent the CEO with partners: hold your own with procurement directors, cooperative executives and investors, and take the meetings that do not need Al.

• Build with AI: use Claude, our MCP server and internal agents as a default part of how you work, and help the team do the same.

About You

You are three to five years post MBB, or an operator at a Series A to C company who has run a cross functional programme. You have owned something from brief to result without a handover, and you want more of that, not a stepping stone toward it.

You likely have:

• Strategic frameworks you bring into the room unprompted: given an ambiguous problem you structure it, form hypotheses and propose how to test them without being led there.

• Executive presence: concise, confident, direct, and able to hold a room with senior public sector or investor audiences.

• A track record of ownership: a programme, launch or deal you ran where you set the plan, made the calls and carried the outcome.

• Experience working with senior stakeholders across time zones, and a clear method for keeping work moving while you are asleep.

• Analytical fluency: comfortable building the number yourself in spreadsheets, dashboards and SQL adjacent tools.

• Hands on use of AI tooling in your own work: agents, MCP, prompt driven workflows.

• Low ego and high standards: direct, curious, and comfortable being challenged.

• Public sector curiosity. No prior government experience required; exposure to procurement, cooperative purchasing or regulated B2B markets is a plus.

What's in it for You

• Real ownership from week one, working directly with the CEO and founders.

• Exposure to every part of a Series A company heading into Series B: product, commercial, partnerships, fundraising and board.

• A clear path to a Head of Operations or GM style role as the company scales.

• A small, committed team of thoughtful operators and engineers across the US and UK.

• Competitive salary and meaningful equity.

• Remote first with regular time together, and travel to the US given how central relationships are.