Founding Operations Lead

7 days ago


Waterloo, Canada Keplar Full time

**tl;dr**: We’re hiring a Founding Operations Lead to build the operational backbone of Keplar as we scale from early traction to breakout growth. You’ll work directly with our CEO and founding team to run finance, HR, legal, compliance, and business operations — establishing the systems that allow the company to move fast, hire well, and execute with clarity. This is a high-ownership, high-trust role for someone excited to architect the operating system of a fast-moving, venture-backed startup.

**About Keplar**:
Keplar is an AI-powered market research platform that enables companies to conduct qualitative research at quantitative scale. Using advanced voice AI and automated analysis, Keplar helps businesses have natural conversations with hundreds of customers simultaneously, transforming months of research into hours of insights.

We’re reinventing **how enterprises understand their customers** — a critical but historically manual and slow function that directly shapes innovation, messaging, product strategy, and brand growth.

**Why This Role Matters**:
We are a small, high-velocity team with strong early traction across mid-market and enterprise customers. To scale effectively — especially across the US and Canada — we need someone who can **build the operational foundation** of the company: the people systems, financial processes, contracting infrastructure, and compliance rhythms that allow us to grow with speed and precision.

This is not a “back office” role. It is **core leadership**. You will work across every part of the business and play a defining role in how Keplar operates.

**What You’ll Own**:
**Finance & Accounting**

- Coordinate bookkeeping and quarterly financial close

- Support annual tax filings and financial reporting

- Manage quarterly investor updates + business metrics reporting

- Work with external accountants to define and maintain U.S.Canada transfer pricing rules

**People & HR**

- Draft and manage employment and equity agreements

- Lead employee onboarding/off-boarding

- Manage payroll and benefits selections

- Develop time-off policies, handbooks, and internal culture documentation

**Legal & Contracting**

- Manage the contracting workflow for customers and vendors

- Modify, adapt, and draft agreements (Order Forms, MSAs, Terms & Conditions, etc.)

- Work with counsel on updates, negotiations, and compliance matters

**Compliance & Risk**

- Ensure we maintain appropriate business insurance coverage

- Lead SOC 2 process (project owner — not technical implementer)

- Maintain standard operating procedures across critical workflows

**GTM & Business Operations**

- Support event operations (e.g., TMRE, Quirks, industry conferences)

- Assist with lightweight content marketing organization and publishing processes

**Executive Partnership**

- Act as EA/Chief-of-Staff to CEO for scheduling and priority orchestration

**What We’re Looking For**:

- Experience in operations at a high-growth startup (ideally seed through Series A/B)

- Strong command of written and verbal communication across stakeholders

- High ownership and responsiveness — you don’t wait to be asked

- Ability to **zoom out** to understand strategy and **zoom in** to solve details

- Comfort handling sensitive situations with empathy, discretion, and clarity

- Strong documentation culture and the ability to “make the implicit explicit”

- Confidence making decisions in ambiguous or fast-changing environments

- Comfort using AI tools (GPT, Claude, etc.) to accelerate execution

If you’re the kind of person who can learn anything fast, create order from ambiguity, and move an organization forward — you’ll thrive here.

**Compensation**:
This is a **full-time** role with competitive salary + meaningful early-stage equity.
You’ll be joining early enough to **directly shape how the company works, scales, and feels.**

If this sounds like the kind of challenge you want to own, we’d love to meet you.


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