
Business Operations at Sieve (San Francisco, CA)
Sieve· San Francisco, CA·
Role details
Job description
About Us
Sieve is a multi-modal lab curating the world's highest-quality training datasets — spanning video, audio, images, text, and 3D. We combine exabyte-scale data infrastructure and novel multimodal understanding techniques that push the frontier of foundation models. Video alone makes up 80% of internet traffic, and across modalities, data has become the enabling medium powering creativity, communication, gaming, AR/VR, and robotics. Sieve exists to solve the biggest bottleneck in the growth of these applications: high-quality training data. We partner with top AI labs and did $XXM last quarter alone, as a team of ~30 people. We also raised our Series A from Tier 1 firms such as Matrix Partners, Swift Ventures, Y Combinator, and AI Grant.
Why Now
Sieve is one of the most capital-efficient teams in AI — roughly 30 people serving the world's leading AI labs across every major data modality. We're growing fast, and the systems, processes, and functions that got us here won't be the ones that get us to the next stage. You'll join at the point where you can have outsized leverage: close enough to leadership to shape decisions, hands-on enough to build the functions that don't exist yet.
About the Role
As part of our Business Operations team , you'll work directly with our executive team to translate strategic priorities into operational reality. This isn't a scheduling or note-taking role, you'll own ambiguous, cross-functional problems end-to-end, stand up new functions from scratch, and bring rigor to how the company operates as it scales.
What You'll Do
- Work directly with leadership team to identify, prioritize, and drive the company's strategic initiatives
- Build and own new operational functions as the company scales — from planning and reporting processes to systems for finance, people, and GTM operations that don't yet exist
- Drive cross-functional projects from ambiguity to execution, working directly with engineering, GTM, and finance to unblock progress and hold owners accountable to deadlines
- Help run the operating cadence of the company: goal-setting, weekly/monthly business reviews, and org-wide planning
- Get into the technical details where needed — jumping in to support different verticals
- Identify gaps in how the company operates before they become urgent, and build the lightweight systems and processes to close them
- Support hiring across the company as we scale the team
Requirements
- 2-5 years of experience in a high-ownership, cross-functional role; chief of staff, business operations, strategy & operations, management consulting, or founding a company
- Experience at a hyper-growth startup, ideally one that scaled quickly and required building new functions and processes from scratch
- Some technical fluency — comfortable having technical conversation, especially in the multi-modal data space, understanding basic infrastructure or model training concepts, or working directly with engineers, even if you're not an engineer yourself
- Strong business operational instincts: comfort with financial models, dashboards, and translating ambiguous goals into concrete plans
- High agency and a bias toward action. You should be comfortable picking up unfamiliar problems and driving them to resolution without much guidance
- Strong organizational skills and the ability to manage multiple concurrent work-streams without dropping details
Nice to Have
- Experience building out a specific function (finance, people ops, GTM ops)
- A technical background (CS, engineering, or a related field) even if your career has moved into operations or strategy
Benefits
- 401(k) and full health insurance
- Breakfast, lunch, and dinner covered, plus your choice of snacks
- Ubers covered home
*All roles at Sieve require you to be onsite in San Francisco 5 days per week
Why work at Sieve
- Culture: The company describes itself as "tight-knit, fast-moving, and deeply customer-oriented." It is a "research lab to the core," combining frontier research with infrastructure and customer partnership. [sieve.ai/about]
- Team: The team brings together experience from NVIDIA, Scale AI, Zoox, and Niantic, providing exposure to top-tier expertise in AI and infrastructure. [sieve.ai/about]
- Impact: Employees will be working on the critical layer of data for the next generation of AI models (generative media, robotics, agents), offering a rare position at the forefront of AI research. [ycombinator.com]
- Remote/Hybrid/Office: The company is based in San Francisco, CA.
- Open Roles: As of mid-2026, they are actively hiring for Applied Research Engineer, Distributed Systems Engineer, Product Engineer, and Software Engineer, with salary ranges listed as $150K - $300K depending on role and experience. [jobs.ashbyhq.com, ycombinator.com]