---
title: 'Chief of Staff at Zeit AI (YC S24)'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/chief-of-staff-zeit-ai-yc-s24-munich-seeg8k8zh4z8'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-17'
---

# Chief of Staff at Zeit AI (YC S24)

- **Company:** Zeit AI (YC S24)
- **Location:** Munich, Germany
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-02
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-17
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/zeit-ai/99a0ec48-f065-449d-9d58-1bf01f630106

## Job description

ZeitMind, the autonomous data engineer for the European mid-market

## About Zeit AI

In the coming years, companies will replace their internal data teams with AI agents to run more efficiently. We will be the solution they'll use. ZeitMind connects to the systems companies already run (ERP, CRM, spreadsheets, internal databases), cleans messy data, runs analyses on its own and builds data applications. Every employee can then work with data in plain language, with no technical degree and no help from IT. Our customers use it to organise agricultural inventories, to schedule maintenance, crew and flights for jet operators, and to replace controllers' manual Excel reports.. Founded by Marvin and Leopold, both ex-Palantir. YC S24, backed by Oxford Seed Fund and Sequoia Scout. Customers in manufacturing, agriculture and aviation. Zero to €1M ARR in our first twelve months with six people. Small team, one room in Munich, regular team offsites.

What This Role Is Marvin and Leopold set the vision. You make it real. Every vision comes with a dozen smaller ones underneath it: how the office should look, how the teams work together, what the brand looks like from the outside, how we run feedback, how we organise as we grow, how information moves through the company. Right now each of these waits for a founder to find time, and it competes with building the product and closing customers. You take them on. You sit next to the founders and hear every decision. You turn what they want into a playbook, then make the hundred smaller calls it takes to get there, without coming back for permission on each one. This is not an admin or operations role. It's the role that clears the path, so the company arrives where the founders want it to be, faster than they would have got there alone.

Your Daily Business - no two days are alike

- Founder leverage: you work directly with Marvin and Leopold on whatever is most urgent that week. A pricing model for a new segment, a board slide that has to be right, a hiring funnel that stalled, a customer contract nobody has read. The range is the job, and the small things are not beneath it
- Cross-functional projects, end to end: from the idea to the thing actually shipped. You coordinate whoever is needed and you stay on it until it is done
- Decision support: research, analysis, a clear recommendation. We want the recommendation, not the options deck
- Investors and board: monthly updates, board materials, data room, ad-hoc requests during fundraising. You own the calendar
- Hiring and onboarding: we are growing fast and every hire changes the company at this size. You run the process so it stays fast and the first week never feels improvised
- The team: offsites, onboarding, the operating rhythm, the office, the things that make one room in Munich work
- Events: which conferences are worth it, what we bring, who speaks, what happens afterwards
- Internal processes and AI: you find the repetitive work and you automate it rather than documenting it

Your Skillset - what you bring to the table

- 5+ years in a fast-moving, high-bar environment: top-tier strategy consulting, investment banking, a high-growth startup, a founder's office, or business operations. We care more about what you drove than how long you were there.
- Founder experience counts double here. If you have started something, run a founder's office, or been a Chief of Staff before, say so. So does the other direction: if you want to found your own company in a few years, that is a reason to hire you, not a risk. This seat is the closest thing to running one without the cap table
- Restless energy. You are a go-getter who pushes things forward, not someone who waits for them to land on your desk. Sharp, structured thinking helps you cut through a vague problem fast, but momentum matters more to us than perfect organisation
- A track record of projects you drove from idea to done, not projects you coordinated
- Excellent communication. You handle an investor, a candidate and an engineer in the same afternoon and adjust for each
- Comfortable with ambiguity and with no one checking on you
- Strong ownership and a bias to action. When something is broken and unowned, you pick it up
- AI-native: you already use AI tools to do in an hour what used to take a day, and you will build the workflows the rest of the team then uses
- German and English fluently. Our customers and most hires are DACH
- Munich, or ready to relocate. This role does not work remotely

## What We Offer

- Full trust, maximum support. You sit next to the founders from day one and see every decision as it is made
- Munich is our hub. In-person by design, and we cover your relocation within Europe
- Regular team offsites
- Best tools, zero blockers. Daily lunch allowance, dinner covered in the office, Wellpass
- €5k referral bonus if we hire someone you refer

## About Zeit AI (YC S24)

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Zeit AI builds an autonomous AI Forward Deployed Engineer that connects to business systems (ERP, CRM, SAP) and turns raw data into operational applications and decisions using natural language.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Startup) — Y Combinator S24 batch, Seed stage
- **Headquarters**: Munich, Germany
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Leopold von Waldthausen (CEO) and Marvin Bornstein (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Data Infrastructure and Analytics, Enterprise AI
- **Target customers**: Mid-market and enterprise companies in Europe, specifically heads of controlling, operations managers, and business operators who rely on ERP, CRM, and SAP systems
- **Mission**: To build the first AI Forward Deployed Engineer for the European market — an autonomous system that connects to source systems, prepares messy data, and turns business questions into operational applications in natural language.

## Products & Services
- **ZeitMind**: The core product — an autonomous AI system that connects to business systems (ERP, CRM, SAP, etc.), cleans messy data, and builds custom operational applications and dashboards using natural language. No IT or data engineering team required. Use cases include inventory control, procurement analytics, financial controlling, and margin risk detection.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Total Funding**: $625,000 USD (Seed round led by Y Combinator, with a prior pre-seed round)
- **Key Metric**: Reached €1M ARR within 12 months of founding
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator (S24 batch), backed by top global investors and industry leaders
- **Growth Signals**: 10 employees (+66.7% YoY), 8 active job postings, reached €1M ARR in first year, customer results include €700k saved through AI inventory control, €24M in unified procurement data, 370 hours back per month from automated reporting

## Competitive Advantages
- **Founder-market fit**: Both founders are former Palantir Forward Deployed Engineers who built and deployed the first instances of Palantir's AIP platform and generated over €50M in new revenue for large industrial clients
- **Speed of deployment**: Claims to deliver measurable results within weeks, not months — a risk-free, low-friction onboarding model
- **Natural language interface**: Business users can build analytics, dashboards, and workflows without engineering effort, using plain language
- **In-person, forward-deployed model**: Engineers work directly at customer sites, ensuring deep integration and rapid value delivery
- **YC-backed credibility**: Part of Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, with strong investor backing

## Strategic Focus
- **European market dominance**: Specifically targeting European industrial and mid-market companies that rely on SAP, ERP, and CRM systems
- **Product-led growth**: Building an autonomous system that scales from initial use cases (inventory, procurement, controlling) to full operational control
- **Hiring aggressively**: 8 open positions across engineering, forward-deployed, sales, and GTM — signaling a push to scale the team and customer base
- **Proven ROI model**: Using a six-month engagement to prove value, track savings, and validate impact before scaling

## Why Work Here
- **High-impact, small team**: A team of 10 engineers, builders, and operators — every hire has outsized ownership and impact
- **YC-backed startup**: Part of Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, with strong investor support and a clear growth trajectory
- **In-person culture**: Munich-based, in-person work — not remote. Engineers are forward-deployed at customer sites, not behind a screen
- **Cutting-edge AI work**: Building with frontier models to solve real, messy enterprise data problems — the kind of work that was previously only possible at Palantir or large tech companies
- **Founding team pedigree**: Founders are ex-Palantir (Leopold led DACH business, Marvin deployed first AIP instances). Early engineers come from Palantir, BCG, and top European tech companies
- **Transparent and principled culture**: The team operates on five core principles: Bias for Action, Live Growth, Ownership, Candor, and Craftsmanship
- **Competitive compensation**: Salaries range from €70K–€120K EUR for engineering roles, with equity (0.10%–1.00%) for founding team members
- **Real business impact**: Customer results include €700k saved in inventory control, €450k in procurement savings, and 90% reduction in Excel reporting

## Sources
1. [zeit-ai.com](https://www.zeit-ai.com/)
2. [zeit-ai.com/about-us](https://www.zeit-ai.com/about-us)
3. [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/zeit-ai)
4. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/zeit-ai)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/zeit-ai)

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