Chief of Staff or Founders Associate

About Grubel Grubel is a research lab that builds AI for high-stakes knowledge work, starting with law. Legal matters require specialized expertise, and each one involves its own facts, practices, parties, and institutions. General-purpose AI applies the same system to every legal matter, varying only what goes into a limited context window. To meet the depth and diversity of legal work, we let every matter build its own AI: engineer the right data for the matter, adapt the model and agent to it, and track what improves. We combine the three into a matter-specific improvement loop that runs until the system delivers what the matter demands. Grubel was founded in 2026 by Moritz Hardt, director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and formerly a UC Berkeley professor and Google Brain researcher; and Reinhard Heckel, professor of machine learning at the Technical University of Munich, on leave to build Grubel. The founding team includes engineers with PhDs in computer science and experience in foundation-model pretraining at Mistral and legal AI research at Thomson Reuters. The lab has offices in Munich and Tübingen. Point Nine led an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round with backing from leading AI researchers and founders, including Jeff Dean, Chris Ré, Ion Stoica, and Harvey co-founders Gabe Pereyra and Winston Weinberg. About the role We are looking for a Founders Associate or Chief of Staff to help build and run the operations of a young company and to automate them as we go. We will hire one person for this role. The title and scope depend on your experience: as a Founders Associate you will work alongside the founders on the operations; as Chief of Staff you will own key operational areas. We want to build Grubel the way we build our products: with AI agents doing significant work. Your job is to help make the company run and to ask which parts of it should be run by software instead. You will work directly with the founders on everything it takes to build the company: hiring, finance, legal and corporate housekeeping across our German and US entities, funding programs, investor communication, and the tools and processes that hold it all together. This is a broad, hands-on role for someone who wants to learn how a company is built from the inside, or who has done it before and wants to do it again with better tools. What you'll work on Running our hiring process, from job postings and candidate communication to contracts and onboarding Keeping our German and US entities in order: accounting, payroll, and corporate paperwork Managing public funding programs and preparing investor updates Setting up the tools our team runs on, and building AI agents that take over routine operations Supporting the founders on projects that do not fit anywhere else, from offsites to partnership contracts You may be a good fit if You have a degree in business, economics, law, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience You have worke