Founder’s Associate — Sales & Operations

Who we are

Pave Robotics is building autonomous robots for road maintenance, starting with crack sealing.

Road maintenance today is overwhelmingly manual. Crews perform repetitive, physically demanding work alongside live traffic using equipment that hasn’t fundamentally changed in decades. We think robotics can make this work dramatically safer, faster, and more cost-effective.

We’re a four-person, YC-backed team in the Bay Area building and deploying real robots that perform real infrastructure work.

Pave was founded by engineers with backgrounds spanning Stanford, Zipline, and Mark Rober’s engineering team. We’re still small enough that everyone at the company has a huge impact on what gets built, what gets sold, and how the company operates.

We’re now looking for our first Founder’s Associate — Sales & Operations to help us build the business around the technology.

What you’ll do

You’ll work directly with the founders across sales, customer deployments, project management, and company operations.

Your initial priority will be simple: help us win customers and successfully deploy our technology.

That will include:

• Finding and contacting cities, paving contractors, and other potential customers
• Cold calling, emailing, and following up with prospects
• Helping move opportunities from first conversation through pilot, contract, and deployment
• Researching and navigating municipal procurement, public works contracts, and bidding processes
• Preparing proposals, quotes, presentations, and customer communications
• Building and maintaining our CRM and sales processes
• Coordinating customer projects and field deployments
• Managing schedules, logistics, vendors, documentation, and follow-ups
• Improving internal processes as we scale
• Taking ownership of operational and back-office problems as they arise
• Taking on high-priority projects directly from the founders

The scope will change constantly. That’s intentional.

We’re four people. If something important needs to happen and nobody owns it yet, there’s a good chance you’ll own it.

What your first 90 days could look like

First 30 days: Learn the product, customers, and road-maintenance industry. Join customer conversations and field operations. Learn our sales pitch and begin independently prospecting and following up with potential customers. Take ownership of keeping our sales pipeline organized.

By 60 days: Run significant portions of the sales process yourself. Own follow-ups with prospects, help navigate procurement and contracting, and coordinate upcoming customer deployments. Start identifying broken or missing internal processes and fixing them.

By 90 days: Own meaningful customer opportunities from prospecting through deployment. Be comfortable talking with everyone from a public works director to a paving contractor to a field crew. Coordinate deployments in the field and take responsibility for making sure projects actually happen.

We don’t expect the exact role at day 90 to look like the role on day one. If you’re great at this job, we’ll give you increasingly large problems to own.

Who we’re looking for

We’re looking for someone extremely high-agency, organized, resourceful, and comfortable operating without a playbook.

You should be the kind of person who sees an ambiguous problem and starts figuring it out rather than waiting for detailed instructions.

You don’t need experience in road maintenance or robotics. You do need to learn quickly, communicate well, and be willing to do both high-level and unglamorous work.

You’ll probably thrive here if:

• You’re comfortable picking up the phone and talking to strangers
• You’re persistent and don’t mind hearing “no”
• You’re highly organized and reliably follow through
• You’re good at turning ambiguous problems into concrete next steps
• You communicate clearly and concisely
• You enjoy working across sales, operations, and project management instead of specializing in one narrow function
• You want significant responsibility early in your career
• You’d rather execute than spend weeks discussing how something should be executed
• You’re willing to get your hands dirty when necessary

What this role is not

This is not a strategy-only role.

Some days you’ll work with the founders on a major customer opportunity. Other days you’ll call 30 paving contractors, chase down paperwork from a city, build a process that doesn’t exist yet, coordinate a nighttime deployment, or solve an unexpected problem in the field.

There will be plenty of opportunities to think strategically, but you’ll also be responsible for turning those ideas into results.

If you want a narrowly defined job with established processes, this probably isn’t the right role.

If you want to help build those processes, work directly with the founders, and take ownership of whatever problems matter most to getting an early-stage robotics company off the ground, we’d love to talk.

Where this can lead

We expect this role to evolve significantly as Pave grows.

You’ll get exposure to nearly every part of building the company and have the opportunity to take ownership very quickly. Depending on your strengths and interests, this could eventually develop into leadership in sales, business development, operations, or another major function of the company.

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Interview Process

Our interview process is designed to move quickly and give both sides a realistic sense of what working together would be like.

1. Intro call — 20–30 minutes

A conversation with a founder about your background, what you’re looking for, and the role. We’ll spend time discussing situations where you’ve taken initiative, dealt with ambiguity, sold or persuaded people, and gotten things done without much structure.

2. Practical exercise — ~60 minutes

We’ll give you a problem similar to something you might actually encounter at Pave. This could involve researching potential customers, thinking through a sales approach, planning a deployment, or solving an operational problem. We’re more interested in how you think and execute than producing a polished presentation.

3. In-person working session — 2–3 hours

You’ll spend time with the founders and team at our office, see what we’re building, and work through a few real problems with us. This is also an opportunity for you to get a realistic picture of the company, the role, and what working here is like.

4. References + offer

For strong candidates, we’ll move quickly. Our goal is to go from initial conversation to a decision within approximately two weeks.