A-Players is a bootstrapped talent and management company: $2M ARR, 8+ years in market, profitable & impact-driven.
We place vetted, trained Business Associates with early-stage US tech startups (Seed to Series A) and run C-Level, Leadership, and Engineering searches for the same kind of founders.
Today that is 50+ associates working with startup teams in New York, San Francisco, and across North America, and a core team of 10 behind them. Operations today is two people, and the daily flow no longer fits in two calendars. We’re adding a third seat. You take over that flow and make it yours.
The role
You’d join as an Ops Associate. It’s a junior role, and we expect you to grow out of it.
For the first weeks you are the helper: you learn how we run things and run them exactly that way. Once the base is yours, you pick your own projects, and if you’re ready for that sooner than we planned, we’ll make room for it.
Growth here is horizontal as much as vertical: when you find the thing you want to do next, we look for a place for it — something most startups our size can’t offer.
From day one, you work inside the environment of US product companies, the tools, the approaches, and the pace they actually run at, with founders on the other end of the process. Our hires have gone to Reddit, Restream, Unstoppable Domains, GRAI, and Poolday, among others, and two companies we hired for at pre-seed are now unicorns. You see how they are run from the inside, not from a newsletter.
The first year is in Ops. After that, we talk.
What you’ll own
Five blocks. You start on the first two with written procedures and the Operations & Systems Lead next to you, and add the other three as you settle in.
1. Associate servicing. Everything that keeps 50+ associates paid, documented and looked after.
Offers, NDAs, and the match paperwork for every new associate
Reference checks, including the follow-ups when a referee goes quiet
Monthly invoices from 50+ associates: collecting them, checking them against the roster, chasing the late ones, preparing the payroll calculation
The records: time off, work anniversaries, and events in Airtable, access requests, and confirmation letters
Day-to-day questions from the associates about any of the above
2. Team and people admin. The part of ops people actually notice.
Birthday and anniversary gifts, get-well and well-being boxes, for associates and the core team
Fun meets and team meetups: the idea, the prep, the logistics
Business trips and offsites, from flights and housing to the budget
Job posts, links, and interview calendars for our own hiring
Accounts, invites, and kit for new core-team members; merch when it comes
3. Requests from the Head of Operations. Research and groundwork need a careful pair of hands.
Pricing a tool or a service, testing it, and writing up what you found
Pulling internal information together into one clean doc or table
Formatting and proofreading before something goes to the team
Finance groundwork (prep only, no judgment)
4. Ad hoc requests from the team. Small, varied, and each one seen through to the end.
Researching a new service or vendor
Tidying up fields in one of our systems
Putting together a quick team survey and the summary after it
Whatever else lands in ops@ and Slack: you triage it, do it, escalate it, or park it, and say which
5. Automation and the Brain. Our processes live as written procedures and AI skills in the Brain, our company knowledge base in GitHub.
From week one you work in it with Claude Code: run the existing skills, fix a step that broke, document what you changed.
By the end of month two you bring your first automation of your own, for a process you already run.
Most of this runs through AI first: the invoice check against the roster, the document pack, the first draft of every letter. Our Ops team has already built the workflows; you run them, fix what breaks, and by month two you start adding your own. What stays huma
