Founders Associate (Product)

Company

Founded in Berlin, autarc is a ~40 person start-up who were part of Y Combinator's S24 batch in San Francisco. Our team consists of people in Sales, Tech and Operations, with the Engineering & Product department currently ~20 people, as we continue to grow throughout the year.

Role description

This is not a traditional Founders Associate role. You won't spend your days in spreadsheets or aligning stakeholders over email. You'll work directly with our CEO across two areas: building product and keeping the company moving fast.

Most of your time (~60–70%) will be spent embedded in our Product & Engineering org. You'll lead customer visits for product discovery, help shape and maintain our product roadmap, run planning sessions and sprint preps with team leads, manage tickets in Linear and open Cursor to ship stuff yourself.

The rest of your time is about making our CEO more effective. That means jumping on calls with key customers, joining sales calls and on-sites, visiting fairs, preparing board decks and investor updates, and handling whatever else comes up on any given day.

Other responsibilities include:

• Support the CEO in shaping and prioritising the product roadmap
• Run product discovery alongside our teams through direct customer engagement
• Manage product operations in Linear: triage, prioritisation, sprint hygiene
• Build and ship features or prototypes directly using AI-assisted development tools (Lovable, Figma, Cursor, Copilot)
• Facilitate planning sessions with product teams and sprint preps with engineering leads
• Represent autarc in customer calls, sales meetings, and training sessions
• Prepare board meeting materials, investor updates, and strategic presentations
• Handle daily ad-hoc tasks

Requirements

• 2-4 years of experience in a high-ownership role at a startup, in VC, in consulting, or in product management
• You can code or you're deep enough in AI-assisted development (Cursor, Copilot) to ship real pull requests
• Strong product intuition: you understand what makes a great user experience and can translate customer conversations into actionable insights
• Comfortable context-switching between a customer call, a board deck, and a Linear backlog within the same morning
• Highly organised and reliable. Our CEO needs to trust that things won't fall through the cracks
• Direct communicator who thrives in fast-paced, ambiguous environments
• Genuine interest in AI tooling and how it's changing the way software gets built
• Berlin-based, hybrid 3 days in the office (Mitte)
• Fluent in English and German

What we offer

• Freedom to choose your own equipment (within a budget)
• 26 paid vacation days
• An annual team retreat
• The choice between Dance or JobRad for mobility
• The choice between Classpass or Urban Sports Club for fitness
• Regular team events, lunches and activities

Next steps

If your application is successful, you will participate in the following:

• Screening call with Louis (Recruiter)
• Culture fit call with a Senior Engineer
• Coding exercise / take home case
• Final on-site interview with Etienne (CEO) and the team

About us

Right now, 25% of CO2 emissions in Europe are caused by heating our buildings. In order for this to be reduced, the transition towards renewable energy needs to be simplified and made more accessible. There are too few installers to meet the growing demand for heat pumps, and a solution to match this trend needs to be brought to the market.
autarc is developing the leading operating system (OS) for heat pump installers, enabling a more digital and efficient installation process for heat pumps.
Through this, autarc is reducing the hurdles to decarbonizing single-family homes and small apartment buildings in Europe, with the goal to help with the planning and designing of 1 million heat pumps by 2030.

Standort

autarc GmbH, Berlin