Founder's Office
You come out of a client call with a problem nobody has framed yet, and you're the one who says: I understand what needs to happen, I'll take it from here.
About Clientell AI
Clientell AI is a San Francisco company. We run Salesforce and revenue operations for enterprise clients, hands-on, and we build the custom AI agents that live inside those systems to handle the work our clients' teams don't have time for. The pod that designs, ships, and stands behind this for our largest accounts sits in HSR Layout, Bangalore.
We're building that team on purpose: one pod, the same accounts, working together instead of handing tickets to each other. Those accounts include a Fortune 100 pharmaceutical company, a European home improvement retail group, and a US commercial fleet safety manufacturer. We'll share more account detail as your interview progresses.
We're seventeen people, and about to be more. The next few hires shape what this company becomes, not just what it ships this quarter.
About this role
Clientell works with enterprise teams to rethink how revenue operations actually get done. We go hands-on inside systems like Salesforce, learn how a business really runs rather than how its process document says it runs, and build the AI agents and automation that take the repetitive operational work off people entirely.
Somebody has to hold the middle of that. A client describes a workflow that keeps breaking, usually badly, because what they're describing is the symptom. Someone has to work out what's actually causing it, turn that into something an engineer can build against, and stay on it until the customer has an outcome rather than a status update. That's this seat, and it sits with the founders.
A day here might be a call with an enterprise customer about a process that keeps failing, an afternoon with our engineers deciding what to do about it, and a note that evening telling the customer what happens next. Another day it's researching a market we don't have a view on yet, pulling a product idea apart, fixing an internal process that's slowing everyone down, or taking a new initiative from nothing to running. We don't expect you to know all of this going in. We expect you to work it out fast and be clear while you're doing it.
One thing before you apply, and it filters more people than anything else on this page. We don't want a generic resume application. Send a short video with it. No production needed, your phone is fine, two minutes is plenty. Cover who you are and what you've worked on, why you want to move into a Founder's Office role, one difficult problem you took ownership of and actually solved, and why you'd be good working directly with clients. Put the link in the portfolio field on the application form, that's the field for it on this role. We're watching it for clarity of thinking and communication, not for production value. If sending a two-minute video feels like too much effort, this probably isn't the right role.
What you'll actually do
- Work directly with enterprise customers to understand how their workflows actually run, not how the process document says they run
- Join client calls with the founders, and take them over yourself once you're ready to
- Turn a business problem into clear technical and operational requirements an engineer can build against
- Work closely enough with the engineering team that the right thing gets built, not the thing that was easiest to describe
- Explain a technical idea to someone non-technical without losing the part that makes it true
- Own the follow-ups, the timelines and the deliverables across client projects. If something slips, it slipped on you
- Write the proposals, analyses, presentations and recommendations that go in front of the customer
- Spot where an existing engagement could be worth more to the customer than it currently is, and say so
- Research new markets, technologies, competitors and opportunities when we need a view we don't have yet
- Run high-priority projects for the founders end to end
- Take the problems that don't belong to any one department, which is most of the interesting ones
What makes you a fit
- You're an engineer by background, and you're more interested in the business behind what you're building than most engineers are
- Your communication is genuinely strong, written and spoken. This is the part we won't compromise on
- You can sit in front of a customer or a senior stakeholder and hold the conversation without someone else in the room
- You can explain a complicated thing simply, without either dumbing it down or hiding behind jargon
- You ask good questions instead of building against requirements you don't actually understand
- You can take an unclear problem and put structure around it before anyone hands you one
- High ownership. Nobody is going to check whether you did the thing
- You're comfortable with technology, data, AI tools and spreadsheets, and you pick up new products, industries and concepts quickly
- You can go from a technical discussion with an engineer to a business conversation with a client leader in the same hour, and adjust how you talk without losing the substance
- You're comfortable being challenged, and you'll challenge an idea yourself when it doesn't make sense. Including ours
- You care about getting to the outcome, not about having completed the task
- Realistically this fits someone around one to one and a half years in with an engineering background. No prior Salesforce or enterprise AI experience needed, but you need to be technically strong enough to understand those systems quickly and talk about them confidently with a customer
Use AI like you mean it
You'll be doing research, analysis, first drafts and a lot of synthesis. If an AI tool can do a chunk of that faster than you, we expect you've already made it do that chunk. What matters more is that you know where it quietly gets things wrong, because your name goes on the output that reaches the customer.
We're not asking you to prepare anything polished for this one. If you've built or automated something with AI, show us on the first call. Two minutes is plenty, and we'll ask what it got wrong and how you caught it.
Even better if
- You've done client-facing or customer-facing work before, in any form, including selling something
- You've touched Salesforce, HubSpot, or any CRM, even as a user. We don't expect it going in
- You've built or automated something with AI tools that saved you real time, however small
- You're comfortable in a spreadsheet past the basics, enough to pull a dataset apart and come back with a view rather than a chart
- You've written something that had to convince someone: a memo, an analysis, a proposal
- You want to end up a founder, a product leader, an operator, or the person a customer asks for by name. This seat is built for that, and it's fine to say so on the first call
What it's actually like here
Worth being blunt about what this isn't. It isn't an administrative Founder's Office seat, so nobody's calendar is your problem and you won't be building decks for someone else to present. It isn't a traditional engineering role either, ticket in, code out, move on. And it isn't consulting, where you recommend something and disappear before anyone finds out whether it worked. You stay in it: understand the problem, talk to the customer, work with the people building the fix, and stay involved until the outcome actually lands.
Some weeks are heavier than others. A client call runs long because the real problem was three layers under what they asked about, a deliverable moves because their change window moved, a project you scoped turns out to be wrong and you're the one who has to say so out loud. When that happens everyone shows up. The rest of the time we don't perform busyness.
You'll be underqualified for parts of this on day one. That's expected at a year and a bit in, and it's the trade. You get direct exposure to the founders, the engineers and enterprise customers, and you get to watch how AI products actually get deployed inside real businesses, how those customers think, how deals and relationships get built, and how decisions get made in a company still small enough that you can see all of it at once.
Compensation and logistics
₹13-14 LPA based on experience and interview performance. ESOP consideration as an early member of the team. Comprehensive health insurance included. First comp review at six months, not twelve.
Full time, in office, HSR Layout, Bangalore. Not remote, our delivery model depends on people overhearing each other's client calls. Direct exposure to US enterprise customers, and travel is possible. We'll walk you through what that involves, including visas, before you join.
How we're hiring for this
This is a different track from everything else we have open. Alongside it we're hiring six Salesforce Developers, four Software Engineers, two Software Engineer Interns and two Growth Interns. Those are all seats with a defined craft and a pod around them. This one sits across the whole company instead and owns no single piece of it, which is either the appealing part or the reason to apply to one of the others. If you read this and mostly wanted to build, look at the Software Engineer role and tell us on the first call.
Interview process
Three steps, not ten. We don't drag interviews out and we don't leave you wondering — you'll know where you stand after each one.
- Thirty minutes with the hiring manager: role fit, your AI demo, your questions
- A working session on a real, messy situation from one of our accounts. We hand you the same half-explained problem we got, you structure it out loud, tell us what you'd need to find out and who you'd ask, and say what you'd take back to the customer. We'll push back, and we're watching whether you update
- A conversation with the founder, we share more account context, you meet the people you'd work with
We aim to close this in under two weeks from the first call. If we pass, you'll hear why.
Apply
Apply for Founder's Office
Resume and a way to reach you is all we need to start. The rest helps, but skip anything that doesn't apply.