Founder's Associate - Talent & Culture (m/w/d)

We build the operating system for renewables: more than 10 GW across 8,000+ plants run on the Amperecloud Platform. Growing that requires energy expertise, and it requires exceptional people. Finding them, developing them and keeping them is what this role exists for.

As Founders Associate - Talent & Culture (m/f/d) you work directly with our founders. You work on who we hire, how we assess, how people grow, and the culture all of it runs on. Within your first year, the talent function becomes yours.

Lead: Frederik (CEO) & Florian Strunck (COO)

Contract type: Full-time, permanent

Start: November

Location: Berlin

The role

Think of it as the founders' office with one clear spine: talent and culture. Two thirds of your time goes there. You drive searches end to end with the founders and help protect the hiring bar, founders included. You build and run our culture programs, feedback cycles and promotion rounds, and you keep our values a working standard that every interview and promotion actually scores against.

The other third is leverage for the founders: the strategic projects that have no department yet. The next planning cycle, an offsite that matters, a build-vs-buy question, the board update. You pick things up whole and put them down finished.

There is a People system in place: leveling, Berlin salary bands, structured interviews with an independent bar raiser. Keep what works, rebuild what doesn't. It's yours to shape.

What you will do

• Hiring: Full-cycle recruiting for few, senior, often technical roles. Outbound-first: you map markets and build pipelines from scratch rather than waiting for applications, and you run the culture screen as the first interview of every process.
• Culture: Our ADEPT values as a working rubric. Every interview, feedback cycle and promotion scores against it, and you keep it sharp.
• Development and retention: Leveling, salary bands, a semi-annual feedback cycle, promotion rounds, VSOP administration.
• Founders' office: Strategic projects end to end, from planning cycles to board preparation.
• Tooling and automation: Our ATS contract ends next year; you help pick and roll out its successor. You build automations across our ATS, Notion and Humaans so manual work keeps shrinking.

What we offer

• People decisions at a 40-person company are company decisions, and you make them with the founders
• VSOP participation like everyone here: if the Operating System for Renewables becomes what we are building, that stake is meaningful
• Salary band shared in the first conversation, not after four rounds
• Development: educational leave, a steep curve by design
• Team & culture: regular offsites
• Mobility & health: JobRad, up to 100% Deutschlandticket subsidy, pension plan, Wellpass/Urban Sports, childcare subsidies

What you bring

• Evidence of excellence, wherever you come from: top-tier consulting or VC, a founders associate seat ready for real ownership, an early startup role where you did a bit of everything well, or your own founding attempt. You were among the best there, and you can show it. We will ask for the proof.
• A talent radar with evidence: people you backed, hired or recommended early who turned out exceptional, and at least one call you made against the room that aged well.
• AI as your default way of working, not a tool you tried. You use LLMs daily and can walk us through real workflows you built. In the interview, you will show us one, live.
• Automation literacy: You have connected tools via APIs or no-code (Apps Script, Zapier/Make/n8n or similar) to kill manual work. You read API docs without flinching. You do not need to be an engineer; you need to think like one about repetitive tasks.
• High agency: you have built things nobody asked you to build, and others still use them.
• Data fluency: strong Sheets/Excel, comfortable owning a funnel end to end; SQL basics a plus.
• German (C1+) and English fluent. Our contracts are German, our company language is English.
• First-principles thinker who writes things down. Default output: a document, not a meeting.
• Low ego, high bar: able to tell a founder no, with evidence.

The process

Exactly the one you will later run: culture screen, skill assessment with a live case (bring your AI workflows), founder final.

We evaluate based on ability and potential, independent of age, gender identity, origin, sexual orientation, disability, or religion.