Founding Business Operations

About Phonic

Phonic is the speech-to-speech model company.

Throughout history, we've found ways to extend ourselves into the world, so we can show up in places we can't be in person. The Yellow Pages put the local business in every home. A website gave a single store a national presence. An Instagram profile introduced us before we said hello.

Much of life takes place in our interactions with these extensions, and when those are frustrating, everyone's day gets a little worse: an appointment you can't book, a payment that doesn't go through, a friend's big news you never saw.

Now, the world is building the most powerful extension of ourselves yet: agents. Soon, every business, product, and person will have agents that represent them in the world, and we'll speak with them.

If those conversations are delightful — the kind that make you feel heard, not handled — everyday life gets a little lighter. Our mission is to make speaking with agents delightful.

This delight lives in the details: the warmth in a voice, the timing of a reply, the judgment behind an answer. Catching these details requires a speech-to-speech model that hears and speaks natively. We're obsessed with building the best one.

How hard would it be to update the Ashby JDs with the following updated text?

About Phonic

Phonic is the speech-to-speech model company. Our models hear and answer in native audio, so voice agents sound natural without compromising on intelligence. Our latest model, Phonic-1, is the most advanced speech-to-speech model for agentic tasks: it takes action while the caller is still talking, switches languages mid-call in the same voice, and stays on task through long, multi-step conversations. We believe building at the frontier means working deeply with the teams we serve, because the thorniest problems in voice only show up in real calls. Solving them has meant rethinking every layer of the stack: data, pre-training, RL, kernels, and infrastructure.

Phonic powers calls across six continents in industries like customer support, healthcare, recruiting, and logistics. We’ve raised $30M+ from leading investors like First Round, Lux Capital, Felicis, and Definition.

About the Team

We’re a small, close-knit team of researchers and engineers from MIT, Stanford, and CMU, including International Olympiad medalists and former founders. We believe small, exceptional teams with extreme ownership and trust do world-class work. Everyone here owns their work end to end and dives headfirst into new problems. We’re fully in person in our SF office.

Phonic is an audio research lab focused on powering the most realistic, human-like voice AI conversations. We’ve rethought the entire stack in pursuit of this goal, from models to product, to create voice agents that feel like they truly understand you, respond emotionally, and perform agentic tasks with frontier intelligence.

Our customers build voice-native AI products in industries like customer support, healthcare, logistics, and recruiting. We’ve grown ~20x since the start of this year, and we’ve raised over $30M from tier-1 VCs, including First Round Capital, Lux Capital, and Felicis.

About the Team

Phonic has an extremely talent-dense and close-knit team of top-tier AI researchers, international olympiad medalists, and former founders. We work with high trust and keep raising the bar on how we deliver world-class research and product experiences. Everyone takes ownership of what they do and isn’t afraid to dive headfirst into new problems. We’re fully in person in our SF office.

About the Role

As a founding member of our business operations team, you’ll work directly with our founders on whatever matters most that week. That might mean getting a customer’s voice agent live, building a dashboard that tracks how every account is doing, testing a new go-to-market idea, or helping close a key hire.

You won’t write production code, but you’ll be technical enough to get hands-on and quick to figure out the rest with AI tools. You’ll be just as comfortable testing a voice agent as you are talking pricing with a customer.

A jack-of-all-trades will thrive here. Maybe you want to start a company one day, or maybe you just get excited by a new problem every week. Either way, you’ll see how every part of a leading frontier AI company works, up close. Over time, you’ll likely find the part of the business you enjoy most and go deeper there; we’ll figure out what that is together.

What You’ll Do

Here’s where we expect you to start. The role is built to be flexible, so expect it to evolve with the needs of the business and your own interests.

Get customers live

• Work with prospects to scope pilots, shape pricing, and move deals from kickoff to close
• Keep each implementation on track, pulling in our engineers when needed, and QA customers’ agents until they beat the alternatives

Keep customers healthy and growing

• Track every live account’s usage, call quality, risks, and next steps, and step in where customers need a hand
• Own follow-ups and escalations, and turn what you hear into product feedback for engineering and research

Grow the business

• Develop and test go-to-market strategies, from outbound to marketing, to reach teams building voice agents
• Build the dashboards and reporting the team
• runs on
• Take on projects nobody owns yet, across finance, legal, ops, and hiring

What You’ll Bring

• 1–5 years at a high-growth startup or in strategy and operations, consulting, banking, or VC
• A strong academic record from a top university
• High velocity and high ownership: you thrive in early-stage environments where the playbook is still being written
• Extreme organization: you run many threads at once, follow up without being asked, and close every loop
• Clear, concise writing and the presence to lead calls with developers and business leaders alike

We’d also love to hear from engineers, product managers, and solutions engineers who want to work more directly with customers.

Nice to Have

• A technical degree (CS, engineering, math, or similar)
• Founder or early-employee experience
• A track record of starting things on your own, like a side project, small business, or community
• Familiarity with real-time streaming, telephony, or conversational AI platforms
• Experience running growth, go-to-market, or pricing experiments

Benefits

• 💸 Top-tier compensation: in order to get the best talent, we provide salary and equity that recognize your skillset
• 🥗 Meals: free breakfast, lunch, and dinner provided in the office
• 🩺 Healthcare: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision
• 🤝 We have regular off-sites and team celebrations