AI Agents have arrived. They are powerful enough to read, plan, and act across your everyday life and work. The question is no longer whether they can run canned demos to check the weather, it’s whether real teams can rely on them for critical work. We optimize for adoption over spectacle: useful, accountable systems that help top professional complete real tasks.

About Wordware. Wordware is backed by Spark Capital, Felicis, and Y Combinator, with a $30M seed round. Our beautiful, historic San Francisco office sits in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge, it’s full of plants and radiates innovation and calm. We genuinely love working together. At lunch we talk about alignment and AI consciousness, we have surfboards in the office ready to use, we take walking meetings on the beach and hang out after work at the bar or climbing wall. We work really hard because we care deeply about what we do.

About Sauna. Sauna is Wordware’s AI workspace for professionals. Think ‘Cursor for Knowledge Work’ and you’re halfway there. With explicit permission, it connects to tools like Gmail, Calendar, Slack, and thousands more, to gather the right context to move your work forward. It learns who you are, drafts and refines your documents, presentations, and datasets, researches across the web and your org’s internal knowledge, summarizes long threads to cut through the noise, proposes next steps, even acts on your behalf when enabled. You can work with Sauna live, side-by-side, or schedule jobs to run automatically in the background, with clear permissions and easy off-switches. Sauna brings the power of AI Agents to all professionals.

Startups are intense, but the intensity is intentional here. We work in focused sessions, cool down, and go again. You’ll have real ownership, clear outcomes, and the satisfaction of seeing your work land with customers, not months from now, but this week. If you’re joining Wordware, you’re choosing impact over spectacle. You’ll shape the product, the standards, and the way we work together. It’s demanding but humane: we write things down, respect time off, and prefer steady progress to late-night heroics.

Who thrives here? People who like small, correct moves that compound. People who stay calm when the plan changes and make the next good decision without drama. People who treat constraints as design inputs, not roadblocks. If you’ve built something from scratch, carried it through the unglamorous parts, and kept your standards high, you’ll feel at home.

We’re not optimizing for résumé lines; we’re optimizing for judgment. You don’t need to be loud. You do need to be reliable, curious, and willing to own outcomes.

We judge by what you build, not when you build it. Weekends are for life. Burnout doesn’t make good software. We’re aiming for something durable and generational, and that requires knowing when to push and when to recharge. If that balance and this mission resonate, we should talk.

Don't see your role? If what we’re building clicks for you and you’re exceptional, tell us. We’ll consider shaping a role around the right person.

How to stand out? Show us signal. Build something with Sauna, send a short note on what worked and what didn’t, or point out a concrete way to improve the product. Clarity beats volume. Initiative beats polish.

If you’re truly excellent, a LinkedIn link is enough—ping it to lucy[at]wordware.ai

⚠️ Please read first

• This is a full-time, in-person role based in San Francisco (Presidio) - we work from the office 5 days a week.

• You must be based in the Bay Area or willing to relocate before starting.

• We require US work authorisation , but are open to O-1 visa sponsorship for truly exceptional candidates.

About the role

We're looking for a Junior Operations Associate who wants to learn what it takes to run a high-performing startup. This isn't a glamorous role, and that's the point. You'll be doing the unglamorous work that keeps everything running—vendor management, onboarding new hires, restocking the kitchen, making sure the office doesn't fall apart. But here's what makes it worth it: you'll be at the center of a fast-growing AI company, learning how things actually work, and earning trust to take on more over time.

You'll work directly with Lucy (Executive Assistant) and Sebastian (Head of Operations), seeing firsthand how operational decisions cascade through the company. Start by mastering the basics. Prove you're reliable, detail-oriented, and can spot inefficiencies. Over time, we'll shape the role around what you're good at and what the company needs.

This is ideal for someone early in their career who knows they want startup experience but isn’t sure exactly what they want to do yet. You'll get exposure to everything, and the ability to have ownership and impact from day 1. It's fine if you've only had part-time jobs or internships before.

What you'll actually be doing

The everyday work:

• Process vendor payments and manage accounting tasks: reconciling invoices, tracking expenses, keeping our books in order

• Handle office operations: restock supplies, organize spaces, coordinate maintenance, make sure the physical environment supports focused work

• Support employee onboarding: coordinate first-day logistics, ensure new hires have what they need from day one

• Manage relationships with external vendors and service providers

• Keep administrative systems running smoothly: the unglamorous glue that holds things together

The learning opportunity:

• Identify process inefficiencies and propose solutions

• Take ownership of small projects that compound over time

• Gradually take on more responsibility in areas that match your interests and our needs

• Get exposure to how different parts of the company operate—from engineering to growth to product

You are probably

• A recent college grad who knows you want to work at a startup but aren't sure exactly what role or career path fits yet

• Not afraid of pitching in: sometimes, what we’ll need most is someone to unload the dishwasher or tidy the kitchen.

• Detail-oriented: you catch the small things before they become big problems

• Process-minded: you look at how things are done and think "there's got to be a better way”

• Quietly reliable: you do what you say you'll do, when you say you'll do it

• Eager to learn by doing: you'd rather be in the arena than on the sidelines

• Not super technical: it’s fine to have a degree not in Computer Science! But you have to be curious and immerse yourself in our product

You definitely have

• Strong organizational skills and attention to detail

• Ability to prioritize across multiple tasks without dropping balls

• Clear, professional communication, both written and verbal

• A positive outlook

• Basic comfort with tools like spreadsheets, email, calendar management, and learning new software quickly

• Work authorization in the US

Why this role matters

Start ups can often fail for boring reasons. Vendors don't get paid, new hires show up to chaos, the office becomes dysfunctional, and small fires become big ones. Your job is to prevent that. It's not flashy, but it's essential.

In return, you get something rare: unfiltered exposure to how a fast-growing AI company actually works. You'll see the decisions being made, understand why they're hard, and learn from people who have built and scaled companies before. You'll work with high-agency, high-trust people who respect competence over credentials.

And over time, as you prove yourself, you'll earn the opportunity to shape your own role around what you're good at and what the company needs. That's how careers are built here—not by climbing a ladder, but by owning outcomes and expanding your scope.

Real talk

• This role requires doing work that isn't always exciting. If you need every task to be intellectually stimulating, this isn't it.

• You'll be accountable for things that feel small but matter enormously when they go wrong.

• We judge by what you deliver, not by how busy you look or how late you stay. Equally, if you want to have a guaranteed departure at 5pm every day, this isn’t the role for you.

• The upside is real: proximity to founders, exposure to decision-making, and the chance to grow into something bigger as you earn trust.

How to stand out

Show us you can think clearly and execute reliably. Send a short note explaining:

• Why you want to start your career in operations at a startup

• A time you improved a process or solved an operational problem (school club, internship, anywhere)

• What you're hoping to learn in your first year

• Full-stack Typescript, Next.js, React and SST serverless on AWS/Cloudflare
• Using TipTap as the core of our IDE with Y.js for collaboration
• PartyKit (Cloudflare Durable Objects) for Y.js websockets and likely for future orchestration of pipelines
• Open source LLMs hosted by Together AI (we’re a customer story on their website) + Groq + OpenAI/Anthropic/Mistral/Google/Cohere/Perplexity for proprietary LLMs