We are Heron Data, a Series A stage company based in New York and London.

• At Heron, we use the latest advances in AI and LLMs to automate document-heavy workflows. Our software handles emails, analyzes attachments, and takes actions like updating CRMs or requesting more info. We serve businesses from small companies to FDIC-insured banks in sectors like Small Business Finance and Commercial Insurance.
• Our largest product automates underwriting for small business lenders and other specialty finance companies. We eliminate cumbersome manual processes and enable our customers to provide their services with much greater speed, precision, and fairness.
• We are a rapidly growing company with over 130 customers in financial services and beyond who trust us to be embedded in critical processes - without us, their businesses stop. We analyze tens of thousands of documents a day, including over 20 million individual bank transactions daily for our customers. We continue to grow into more segments and workflows: further into lending and banking, insurance, and legal. And we think there's much more we can do!
• We are a lean, scrappy and committed team with a flat structure and collaborative culture. Our team brings together a wealth of experience from top-tier tech companies including Facebook, Spotify, Asana and Revolut and universities including Oxford, Harvard, MIT and Yale.
• With team members from five different continents, we embrace multiculturalism and diversity. From company events to everyday interactions, we make sure everyone feels welcome and accommodate all cultural and dietary requirements.
• Since our launch in September 2020, at the end of the S20 batch, we've experienced a lot of growth! Today, we serve over 130 customers and have over $5M in ARR. Read more about our mission here

As a Founder Associate at Heron, you will work alongside our CRO and Heron co-founder Jamie. This role is ideal for someone who wants to make a career in sales, especially if you do not have a background in sales, but instead have a more technical or data-heavy background.

Please do not apply to this role if you are not interested in Sales!

What you will specifically work on will change week-to-week. Some current or recent projects that a Founder Associate could work on include:

• Define and execute go-to-market strategy for a new customer segment e.g., commercial insurance
• Find leads, build a sales pipeline, join sales calls
• Analyze customer and prospect data to inform decision making
• Scale Jamie, including basic admin tasks like scheduling when needed (we anticipate less work like this, but it may occur)
• Any other project that is impactful to Heron!

We don’t expect the ideal candidate to have had prior experience with any of the projects above. We believe this role will particularly suit technically-minded generalists with a growth mindset, who want to learn quickly and make an impact across all parts of a fast growing startup

Skills and Qualifications

We believe a successful Founder Associate will relate to some of the following actions. If you’re not sure, reach out to us and ask!

• Have a technical background & can solve quantitative problems, for example (but not limited to) majored in a technical degree, worked as a software engineering or a data scientist, comfortable working with data & basic code. Heron is a very technical company, so we believe that even our Founder Associates can profit from technical skills
• Be interested in Sales. This role is an amazing opportunity to be in a high-intensity sales environment, and learn very quickly.
• Make decisions in a structured and evidence-based way. Break down complex problems into simple components & frameworks
• Communicate effectively with anyone, from a Heron software engineer to an enterprise customer — this not only includes verbal communication, but also written communication (e.g., strategy memos) and presentations (e.g., customer pitch deck)
• Analyze data (SQL, spreadsheets), maybe even automate tasks (e.g., with Python)
• Execute tasks independently, possess a strong work ethic
• Learn even unfamiliar areas of the business rapidly
• Promote an outcome-focused, low-bureaucracy team culture

Additional info

• This is an in-person role out of our NYC office. All 3 founders love working with each other in-person, and we would love for anyone in this role to work side-by-side with the founders
• Authorization to work in the United States and willingness to be based in New York City
• Willingness to travel as required (e.g., to all parts of the USA to visit our customers, or London for a strategy offsite)

Perks

• Competitive compensation, including equity
• Based full-time and in-person in our NYC office, with occasional travel to customers (across the country) and company retreats (often in London)
• Your choice of top-of-the-line equipment to fit out your desk in our office
• Competitive benefits package: health, dental, vision with partial coverage for dependents; 401K; uncapped PTO; parental leave
• Free mental health support via Spill - on-demand access to therapy
• Weekly company lunches (always inclusive - especially if you like Vietnamese food!)

Applicants from any background and gender are welcome and we have a zero tolerance policy on discrimination

• For Frontend -- our customer dashboard is built with NextJS, using MUI, React, and TypeScript. We deploy our frontend apps on Vercel
• For Backend -- our backend applications are primarily written in Python using the Flask or FastAPI frameworks. We have both a main monolith and also microservices. We containerize & deploy these applications on Kubernetes clusters or on managed compute (serverless)
• For ML — we have a variety of classification & prediction tasks that we deploy different models for, ranging from classic ML models / NLP techniques to fine-tuned LLMs
• For infrastructure — we use both GCP and AWS for different components. Some of our main components include Postgres database, cloud storage, Redis cache, RabbitMQ/Redis queue to manage async tasks. All of our code repositories live in GitHub and we use GitHub actions extensively for CI/CD