Workplace Operations Lead

The owner of the physical company. You'll run our Los Angeles workspace like a product - and report to the founder until the operations seat above this one is filled.

Product.ai is the verified truth layer for shopping - the intelligence that tells you what's actually true about a product, including when not to buy. Profitable. Bootstrapped. No outside investors. No board. 20 people outbuilding companies 10× our size.

Strong people find us and keep finding us - they apply over months and years, because the field moves fast and the exact profile we need moves with it.

Why This Role Exists

We're 20 people with a workspace in Los Angeles and an operating tempo where the digital layer largely runs itself - AI tools produce code and content in long unattended runs while the team designs and verifies. The physical layer deserves the same operational excellence, and today it has no owner. Builders fly in for paid work trials. Partners come through for working sessions. New hires need to be productive on day one. The space itself is part of how we recruit - and we want someone who runs it like a product.

Be clear about the altitude: this is office operations excellence, end to end, owned by one person with real authority over it - a standalone craft, stated plainly. You own the physical world. The company's broader operational layer will eventually sit under a senior operations seat; this role keeps its full ownership of the physical world intact within that scope.

The System You'll Need to Model

• The workspace as a high-trust workshop. Candidates fly in for paid trials, partners come through for working sessions, and the space is the first physical evidence of how we operate. Hospitality and operational discipline pull against each other - warm enough that every visitor feels hosted, systematized enough that everything holds without depending on anyone's memory.
• Vendor and facilities operations with automation underneath. Cleaning, catering, maintenance, equipment, supplies - a web of vendors and reorder cycles where the repeatable parts (inventory, scheduling, follow-ups) run on AI tools you'll use daily; the judgment of which vendor, what quality bar, when to escalate stays yours.
• Onboarding logistics as a product. A new builder should be productive day one: equipment provisioned, access granted, workspace ready. That's a falsifiable outcome - an evidence test a stranger could run on any start date.
• Event operations as repeatable formats. Team days and partner sessions that get better every time because you systematize what worked and let the next event inherit it.
• A company moving at AI speed - product decisions in days, shipped work in hours. The physical layer keeps up by being systematized rather than heroic. You model where the company is heading and have the space ready before anyone asks.

If reading that energizes you, keep going. If it feels overwhelming or underspecified, this isn't the right fit.

What You Will Own

• The workspace as a recruiting product. The Los Angeles office end to end - space, equipment, supplies, maintenance, daily rhythm. Every candidate, trial builder, and partner who walks in forms a judgment about how we run; success is visitors leaving convinced we run the physical world as well as the digital one.
• Onboarding and trial logistics. Equipment, access, travel, and space for new hires and trial builders. The evidence test: a builder who starts Monday ships work Monday. You coordinate with the team on accounts and tooling so a first day runs clean.
• Event operations. Team days, partner sessions, and visit logistics - you design the formats, run them, and turn what works into a system the next event inherits.
• Vendor and facilities operations. Contracts, scheduling, inventory, budget. You run the repeatable parts on AI tools and own the verdict on quality and cost. Decision authority is explicit and in writing - vendor spend thresholds and sign-off lanes get defined in your first 30 days.

Who You Are

You independently form a working model of how a space serves the people in it - what has to be true for a visitor to feel hosted, a new hire to be productive, an event to land - and when something breaks, you fix the system, not just the instance. You move between the spreadsheet and the room with ease: renegotiating a vendor contract in the morning, resetting the space for a partner session in the afternoon. You automate the repeatable and sweat the human details; AI is your daily leverage here, and we'll teach you how we use it - you bring the operational judgment and make the good calls in the gray area. You write clearly - runbooks, checklists, vendor briefs - because clear writing is evidence of clear thought.

You've run a place where the physical world had to work every day - an office, a venue, a studio, an event series, a hospitality floor - and you made it work through systems rather than stamina. You've built checklists and vendor relationships that outlived your tenure. You can do this job by hand and prove it. We care about the artifact and the reasoning more than where you did it.

Who this isn't for. This role is wrong if you want remote - it's in-person by nature, five days a week in Los Angeles. It's wrong if you need a daily task list handed to you, or if you read office operations as low-agency work - here you run it like a product, with real authority and real accountability. It's wrong if you're mainly optimizing for the title on the org chart, or if you're treating an operations seat as a stepping stone to a chief-of-staff role - this is operations excellence at the office altitude, a standalone craft, and it's stated plainly. You'll be happiest here if you're a systematizer with hospitality instincts who takes genuine pride in a space that simply works.

How We Evaluate

We don't run traditional office-operations interviews.

Written artifact. Submit something you wrote that shows how you run an operation - a runbook, an onboarding checklist, an event plan, a vendor process. Writing quality is our first filter.

Video screen. Brief and async - 5-6 questions, about 15 minutes total, done whenever works for you.

Calls with company stakeholders. Short conversations with key members of the team.

Conversation with the founder. Chemistry, and whether you can model the system above.

Paid work trial. Two weeks, paid, real work in our real environment - you'll run the actual space. We both learn more in two weeks of real collaboration than in hours of interviews. In the trial we watch how you ground yourself in how we actually operate, whether you write the system before the fix, how you verify what your tools and vendors actually delivered, and whether your self-assessment is honest.

Compensation & Ownership

Total first-year comp: $175,000 - $200,000 (base + equity + profit sharing). Base: $120,000 - $145,000.

Profits Interest Units (PIUs) - Class B Membership Interests at $0 strike, real ownership day one, capital-gains treatment; annual pro-rata profit sharing from free cash flow; annual tender liquidity; 100% family premium coverage; effectively unlimited token budget, steered by ROI, never capped.

Based in Los Angeles, five days on-site.