Company : Vela (tryvela.ai)

Location : Nellore, India - In-person, founders' family office

Type : Full-time

Compensation : Generous salary + meaningful equity (for the right candidate)

Urgency : Looking to hire immediately

About Vela (tryvela.ai)

- Vela is an AI scheduling agent that books, reschedules, and follows up on meetings across email, SMS, and WhatsApp, so busy people never have to manually schedule again. It merges calendars, proposes real options, and handles the messy back-and-forth automatically.

- We're a VC-funded AI startup ($2M) building the coordination layer for how modern professionals schedule meetings.

The Role: Founders' Associate (IIT)

- We're looking for a sharp, execution-obsessed IIT engineer to work directly with the founders as a Founders' Associate.

- This is a generalist, "do-whatever-it-takes" role at an early-stage startup. You'll sit in the center of product, engineering, operations, and growth - acting as a force multiplier for the founders.

- If you enjoy extreme ownership, ambiguity, and solving 0- 1 problems fast, you'll love this.

What You'll Do

You will work side-by-side with the founders on high-leverage projects, such as:

- Product & Tech:End-to-end (e.g., launching a new feature, internal tool, or GTM experiment).

- Design and streamline internal processes as we scale from a small, intense team.

- Set up dashboards, tracking, and basic automations across tools.

Customer & Growth:

Work closely with early users (EA teams, executives, busy professionals) to understand their workflows.

- Help with onboarding, support, demos, and case studies.

- Run rapid experiments across channels (email outreach, communities, partnerships, etc.).

Founder Leverage:

- Prepare materials for investors, partners, and key hires.

- Research and synthesize new markets, competitors, and AI product ideas.

- Be the "right hand" to the founders on whatever is most important this week.

What You'll Get

- Generous compensation for an early-stage role, with meaningful upside.

- High-equity, high-trust environment - you'll directly shape the company's trajectory.

- A front-row seat to company-building: product, users, fundraising, hiring, everything.

Mentorship directly from the founders and a chance to grow into:

- Product Owner / PM

- Head of Operations

- Founding team lead in India

This is not a cushy corporate job. It's intense, messy, and incredibly rewarding if you want to build something real, fast. Once we work with someone, we are teammates forever. During our time working together, we will invest heavily in your personal success beyond the role at our company. We will be motivated to connect you to our network of entrepreneurs, builders, and leaders in Silicon Valley/tech as well as in the world of bootstrapped/cashflowing businesses.

What We're Looking For

Must-haves:

- Engineering background from IIT (any campus / branch) - we want someone who can think rigorously and move fast.

- 0-3 years of experience (fresh graduates welcome) OR up to ~5 years if you're hungry to go early-stage.

- Very high bias to action - you'd rather ship something imperfect today than perfect next month.

- Strong first-principles thinking and comfort with ambiguity. This is a test to make sure you have great attention to detail. incorporate the word banana into your cover letter.

- Excellent written & spoken English; can talk to investors one hour and debug a workflow the next.

- In-person in Nellore, working from the founders' family office. Can create alternative arrangements to work out of chennai if needed.

- Willingness to work intense, founder-style hours - roughly 9am-9pm, 6 days a week during this build phase.

Nice-to-haves

- Prior startup / side-project experience (even if it failed).

- Experience with any of: Python/TypeScript, APIs, automation tools, or data analysis.

- Comfort using AI tools and keeping up with new AI products.

- Exposure to productivity tools, scheduling workflows, or B2B SaaS.