Pluralis Research

Founders Associate (Business Operations) at Pluralis Research (Sydney, Australia)

Pluralis Research· Sydney, Australia·

Role details

Work type
Remote
Employment
Full-Time

Job description

Pluralis Research pluralis.ai carries out foundational research on Protocol Learning arxiv.org/2412.07890: multi-participant training of foundation models where no single participant has, or can ever obtain, a full copy of the model. The purpose of Protocol Learning is to facilitate the creation of community-trained and community-owned frontier models with self-sustaining economics.

As a Founders Associate (Business Operations), you'll build up to owning end-to-end projects across go-to-market, operations, and "the 100 other broken things" that need fixing in a startup. One day, you'll be managing campaigns directly with our CEO, the next you'll be fixing a broken integration or engaging with contributors.

This is by no means an easy gig, but it is the best entry point into a startup one could ask for - exposure to all facets of an AI business, working direct with the exec team at a time of rapid growth.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

  • GTM Execution: You want to own and drive go-to-market strategy and execution - supporting our growth and partnerships initiatives.
  • Operational Excellence: Build and maintain operational infrastructure: processes, tooling, reporting. You find something broken, you relish in fixing it.
  • Strategic Projects: Exposure to strategic projects across partnerships, community, marketing and ecosystem development.
  • Business Ops: Directly support our founder & CoS in day to day operations of the business.
  • High Agency: Pick up and run with whatever is the most important task on any given week.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

  • In General: 1-2 years of experience in management consulting (tier-1), high-growth startup operations, or venture capital.
  • High Agency: Demonstrated bias toward action. You default to doing, not asking for permission.
  • Strong analytical toolkit: comfortable building models, pulling apart data, and synthesising findings into clear recommendations.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication. You can draft a professional memo and rally an executive team behind it.
  • Genuine interest in AI: Whether current models, decentralised systems, or frontier technology. You may be non-technical, but you're curious enough to go deeper than the average person.

BONUS POINTS

  • Show us what you tinker with that's AI related on weekends.
  • Experience with highly complex technical infrastructure.
  • Highly succinct in actions and impact.

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

  • Competitive base salary.
  • Equity that represents meaningful ownership in an early stage startup.
  • Remote-first culture.
  • Regular cadence of offsites and opportunity to work in the US.
  • Direct access to the founder and exposure to every function of the business.

FYI'S

  • This role is only open to candidates with full working rights, based in Australia.
  • Applicants must have professional-level English proficiency (written and spoken).
  • Pluralis is a remote team across Australia and the US. You'll need to be comfortable working across timezones and collaborating with a diverse, distributed group.
  • Recruiters: we aren't looking for agency support at this time. We'll reach out if we need help.

Backed by Union Square Ventures usv.com and other tier-1 investors, we're a world-class, deeply technical team of ML researchers. Pluralis is unapologetically ideological. We view the world as a better place if we are able to implement what we are attempting, and Protocol Learning as the only plausible approach to preventing a handful of massive corporations monopolising model development, access and release, and achieving massive economic capture. If this resonates, please apply.

Why work at Pluralis Research

  • Culture of Radical Openness: The mission is to democratize AI ownership. Work here is published openly, and researchers contribute to a public good.
  • High Impact, Small Team: With only 17 people, every hire has an outsized influence on shaping the protocol and company direction.
  • Research First: The team is PhD-heavy and publishes at top-tier conferences (NeurIPS). The environment is scholarly and technically deep.
  • Remote-Flexible (Hybrid): Presence in San Francisco (US) and Australia (largest cohort of 12 employees). The job postings do not mandate 5 days in-office; distributed collaboration is core to the product itself.
  • Top-Tier Investor Backing: Backed by USV and CoinFund, providing strong financial runway and network effects in both the AI and crypto/Web3 ecosystems.
  • Founding Team Pedigree: Work alongside former researchers from Anthropic, Google, and Amazon, creating a steep learning curve for ML engineers and scientists.

Application questions