---
title: 'Founder''s Associate at Risely AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founder-s-associate-risely-ai-san-francisco-5y4kwpe4he7j'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-11'
---

# Founder's Associate at Risely AI

- **Company:** Risely AI
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-05-11
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/risely-ai/am9icG9zdDoI17PNuSJiZZCSiWlvjFXG

## Job description

Founder's Associate

Location: Downtown San Francisco, in-person 5 days a week

Comp: $90-130K cash (incl. variable) plus founding-level equity

Risely is building the agentic operating system for universities. We're live at some of the largest universities in the country and growing fast.

## The role

You'll work directly with the founders to support and manage the company behind the scenes. The job is to take the messy operational reality of an early-stage startup and turn it into something that actually functions. Anything that needs an owner becomes yours until someone else picks it up.

Think of yourself as the operating system of the company. The founders are doing customer calls, hiring, fundraising, and product. You're making sure everything else moves: the internal processes, the data, the tools, the follow-ups, the projects in flight, the things that would otherwise slip.

A normal day might look like this:

- Morning: tighten up the financial model
- Midday: build a Claude Code agent that enriches a CRM list
- Afternoon: sit in on a customer call, take notes, own the follow-ups
- Evening: clean up a hiring pipeline with agents

The next day looks completely different. The pace is hours and days. You should be the kind of person who, by 11am, has already finished two things and started a third.

## What you'll do

A real mix of ops, internal building, and strategic projects. Some on repeat, a lot of it for the first time:

- Support and manage internal operations. Vendors, contracts, hiring logistics, finance ops, the back office. You keep the machine humming so the founders can stay focused on the rest.
- Actually build internal tools and agents. We run a lot of Claude Code in parallel. You'll write real Python and TypeScript that automates the next manual process: CRM hygiene, prospect research, reporting, internal workflows. Hands-on engineering.
- Own strategic projects end to end. Market research, competitive analysis, hiring sprints, vendor evaluations, special projects the founders need someone to drive. You scope it, do it, ship it.
- Keep the company organized. Notion hygiene, project tracking, meeting prep and follow-ups. You're the reason nothing falls through the cracks.
- Support customer launches. New customer signed? You're in the trenches of every launch: supporting kickoff, coordinating integration timelines, tracking internal handoffs, getting things ready for go-live. Launches are how we turn contracts into ARR.
- Support sales execution. Pipeline research, prospect outreach, deal follow-ups, proposal building, customer recaps, conference prep. The founders run the deals; you're the operator behind them, making sure everything moves.
- Make customers successful post-launch. Sit in on calls, track whether they're getting value, flag issues early, own the operational side of the relationship.
- Be the second pair of eyes. Catch what fell through. Ship the deck. Own the loose ends.

Who we're looking for An operator at heart. The kind of person who looks at a chaotic process and instinctively wants to clean it up, document it, and automate the boring parts.

- Master of your own time. You'll have ten things going at once and that feels normal. You prioritize ruthlessly, switch context fast, and protect time for the work that actually matters.
- You actually build. Python, SQL, APIs, scripts that run nightly. You've shipped real code before and you use it every day.
- AI-native. You've built something real with Claude or Cursor and have opinions on where agents add leverage and where they don't.
- Sharp writer. Memos, recaps, internal docs, customer emails. People understand what you mean and act on it.
- Naturally organized. You take notes that you can find later. Things you commit to get done.

0-2 years out of school. You're joining the founding team and the upside reflects that.

What it's like to work here Risely is a startup in the truest sense. We are all in. The pace is intense and the work is demanding, and the impact is real.

- In-person commitment. We're in the office together. Building at this stage takes full presence and full focus, and that often means evenings and the occasional Saturday.
- Speed and impact. Your work ships fast and changes how we operate in days, not quarters.
- Mission clarity. Every late night ties back to one purpose: helping students stay enrolled and helping colleges survive a generational shift.
- Ownership from week one. You'll make critical decisions and drive real outcomes from the start.
- Deep, meaningful work. You'll wrestle with real operational complexity inside a fast-moving company. The problems are hard, and solving them changes how Risely runs.

If this excites you, join us at the ground floor. The work will stretch you and demand your best. It will also be the most meaningful work of your career.

Bonus Higher education experience or a real interest in fixing how universities run. Something you shipped that real users used. Experience supporting and managing operations, ops-heavy internships, internal tooling work, or any sales / customer-facing experience.

## About Risely

Colleges are in trouble. One in three students drops out today, even after schools spend millions to recruit them. Overburdened staff comb through fragmented data by hand and miss the warning signs until it's too late. We founded Risely to back the mission of higher education through the biggest systemic and technological shift the industry has ever faced. We build AI digital workers that handle the real operational work universities are drowning in: enrollment, advising, advancement, student services. We deploy them inside the systems institutions already use, and we make them work.

We're live and growing fast. Our customers include R1 research universities and private colleges around the US. We're a small team, YC-backed, well-funded, and building like the future of higher ed depends on us.

How to apply Apply below and if you're highly interested, email shahryar@risely.ai with a paragraph on why this role and a link to something you've built.

## About Risely AI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Risely AI builds AI digital workers for higher education that handle enrollment, advising, and advancement operations across campuses.
- **Entity Type**: Private startup (Y Combinator S25; funding stage not publicly disclosed)
- **Headquarters**: United States (specific city not publicly disclosed)
- **Founded**: Not publicly disclosed; part of the YC S25 batch (2025)
- **Founders**: Shahryar Abbasi (CEO & Co-founder), Sadia Saifuddin (CPTO & Co-founder)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: EdTech / AI agents for higher education
- **Target customers**: B2B — colleges, universities, R1 research institutions, and private universities; users include enrollment teams, academic advisors, advancement staff, and institutional leadership
- **Mission**: Transform education so its power reaches far more people. The company focuses on technology carrying administrative burden while people keep judgment, responsibility, and relationships. ([risely.ai/about](https://www.risely.ai/about))

## Products & Services
- **Enrollment Agent**: Triages inquiries by intent, pulls phone/email/CRM history into one view, and prompts counselors with next-best actions. Claims measurable enrollment lift in 43 days at one private university. ([risely.ai](https://www.risely.ai/))
- **Advisor Agent**: Flags at-risk students, drafts personalized outreach, and generates success plans inside SIS, LMS, and CRM systems. Cited as adding advisor capacity at a top R1 university. ([risely.ai](https://www.risely.ai/))
- **Advancement Agent**: Manages donor pipelines, identifies prospective donors from engagement signals, and drafts personalized stewardship at portfolio scale across thousands of donors. ([risely.ai](https://www.risely.ai/))
- **Platform / Intelligence Layer**: Unifies institutional systems, routes signals to specialist agents, and allows agents to share context with each other to deepen institutional intelligence. ([risely.ai](https://www.risely.ai/))

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding not publicly disclosed; company is YC-backed and describes itself as “well-funded.” Currently live at four schools, including R1 research universities and private U.S. colleges. ([linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/risely-ai), [risely.ai/careers/fde](https://risely.ai/careers/fde))
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator (YC S25); customers include R1 universities and private colleges around the U.S. ([linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/risely-ai))
- **Growth Signals**: Deployment in as little as 6–12 weeks; no data migration required; claims an enrollment lift within 43 days at a private university; advisor capacity added at a top R1 university; advancement stewardship at portfolio scale. ([risely.ai](https://www.risely.ai/))

## Competitive Advantages
- **Agentic platform purpose-built for campuses**: Works inside existing SIS, LMS, CRM, advancement, and finance systems rather than requiring replacement or migration. ([risely.ai](https://www.risely.ai/))
- **Shared institutional context**: Agents pass context to one another, creating a compounding intelligence layer unique to each institution. ([risely.ai/about](https://www.risely.ai/about))
- **Fast, customer-specific deployment**: The company handles technical setup, integrations, policy configuration, and training, with go-live in 1–3 months depending on institution size. ([risely.ai](https://www.risely.ai/))
- **Outcome-focused positioning**: Uses real institutional data to model how retention lifts protect tuition and free up advisor time. ([risely.ai](https://www.risely.ai/))

## Strategic Focus
- Expand the number of deployed agents and institutions, with an emphasis on “agentic” institutions where software carries routine work from signal to completion.
- Continue building customer-specific agent workflows rather than generic solutions; the company states “generic agents lose; customer-specific agents win.”
- Push repeatable integrations and fixes back into the platform so future deployments become faster.
- Reinforce the mission of helping colleges survive a generational shift by improving retention and operational capacity. ([risely.ai/about](https://www.risely.ai/about), [risely.ai/careers/fde](https://risely.ai/careers/fde))

## Why Work Here
- **Small team, high ownership**: Roles like Forward Deployed Engineer own customer deployments end to end — from kickoff and data engineering to launch and training. ([risely.ai/careers/fde](https://risely.ai/careers/fde))
- **Fast impact**: Work reaches real users in days, not quarters. ([risely.ai/careers](https://www.risely.ai/careers))
- **Compensation and equity**: FDE role listed at $120–180K plus founding-level equity. ([risely.ai/careers/fde](https://risely.ai/careers/fde))
- **In-person culture**: The company emphasizes in-office presence and intense, fast-moving startup pace — including occasional evenings and Saturdays. ([risely.ai/careers/fde](https://risely.ai/careers/fde))
- **Meaningful technical challenges**: Engineers work with messy institutional data, privacy regulations, and legacy systems; the problems are hard and directly affect student retention and institutional survival.
- **Visa sponsorship**: Currently unable to sponsor work visas; applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S. ([risely.ai/careers/fde](https://risely.ai/careers/fde))

## Sources
1. [risely.ai](https://www.risely.ai/)
2. [risely.ai/about](https://www.risely.ai/about)
3. [risely.ai/careers](https://www.risely.ai/careers)
4. [risely.ai/careers/fde](https://risely.ai/careers/fde)
5. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/risely-ai)

## Other roles at Risely AI

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