Level

Footprint

Founding Strategy & Ops

Footprint is hiring a Founding Strategy & Ops in New York, United States. It pays $120k-$160k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Level.

AI in this role

Lead strategy and operations to secure proprietary data sources and scale infrastructure for an agentic AI financial crime platform.

pythonsql
ai-agentsstrategyoperationsdata-acquisitionvendor-negotiationfinancial-analysis

Footprint is the agentic platform that learns your compliance program and runs it end to end.

Compliance teams at banks and fintechs are drowning in financial crimes investigations. Transaction volumes are surging, regulators keep raising the bar, and the work still runs on manual review queues stitched together from legacy vendors. Percy, our agentic system, learns each team's procedures and makes the same calls their analysts would: clearing false positives, escalating real risk, writing the case narrative, and documenting every decision for audit. It cuts review workloads by 70%+.

The harder problem is underneath. Every investigation is grounded in the data sources compliance teams already trust, and every case commits to an organizational memory that compounds — so a pattern one analyst caught in March surfaces automatically in October, across KYC, EDD, sanctions, and monitoring. Whether the team is five analysts or 500, they share one brain. Every memory carries provenance. Agents propose; humans approve. That's four years of identity infrastructure sitting under the agent, and it's the part nobody can bolt on later.

We're backed by QED, Index, and Box Group, and trusted by FDIC- and OCC-regulated banks plus fintechs like Bilt, Nuvei, and MoonPay. We 5x'd revenue last year. The team is small, senior, and ships fast.

The Role

Footprint's AI agent, Percy, investigates financial crime for the largest fintechs and financial institutions. Percy is only as good as the data behind it, and the best data isn't easily accessible. Somebody has to find those sources, figure out which vendors are real and which are noise, negotiate the terms, and get signed agreements to engineering. That's the biggest piece of this job, and we think it's some of the highest-leverage work at the company, because proprietary data is one of the few durable advantages left in AI.

You'll also own the operations behind our go-to-market. Sales and marketing have grown faster than the systems behind them, and today it takes manual work to answer basic questions about the business. You'd build the tooling and reporting that fixes that.

Finance operations are part of the job too, from vendor negotiations to headcount planning and budgeting as we grow.

Beyond that, you'll have real freedom to go after whatever you believe is the most important problem at Footprint. Pricing strategy, a new market, a partnership worth evaluating. You'll be close enough to the whole business to see these before most people do, and you'll have the backing to act on them.

You'll report directly to Surya, our Chief of Staff.

What You'll Own

  • Integrating data sources end to end. Map which vendors exist, and work out who is legitimate and who is noise. Take the calls, negotiate the terms, get the contract signed. Engineering runs the back-test that tells us whether the data is any good; you own everything around it. The highest-value sources get acquired one relationship at a time, so finding those and turning them into signed agreements is part of this too

  • Revenue operations. Our CRM is the system of record for a sales team that has grown around it, and it needs an owner. You clean it, you set the standards for how it is used, and you build the reporting the team runs on

  • Sales efficiency. You sit close enough to the SDR and AE motion to see where time is going, and you fix it. The goal is that the sales team spends less time on process and more time selling

  • Go-to-market analytics. Cost of acquisition against lifetime value, what our marketing returns, how deal cycles move after we show up at an event. You build these into standing numbers leadership can act on, measured the same way each month

  • High-priority, ambiguous projects. Pricing strategy, market analysis, new market entry, partnership evaluation, sales compensation design, or whatever the business needs most

  • Finance operations. You run AR and AP, and you work with the Chief of Staff on vendor negotiations. Headcount planning, budgeting and the forward look for next year sit here too, though they aren't the main event

Must-Have

  • 1-4 years of analytical work under real time pressure: investment banking, consulting, private equity, a startup, or an operating seat at a fast-growing company

  • You're a high-agency operator: you've spotted a gap nobody owned, filled it without being asked, and can point to what changed because you did

  • You've owned an ambiguous, cross-functional problem end to end and driven it to an outcome you can walk us through

  • Excellent written and verbal communication; you can run a vendor call and write the recommendation memo afterward

  • You're intellectually curious and learn fast: you can get up to speed on a completely unfamiliar domain within weeks

Nice-to-Have

  • Exposure to fintech, financial services, fraud or compliance. We're a company built on detecting and stopping financial crime, so context helps

  • You've founded a company or worked at an early-stage startup, and you've done the unglamorous cleanup work and cared about getting it right

  • Familiarity with business systems, workflow automation, or internal AI tooling

  • FP&A experience. Nobody at Footprint does this work today, so you'd be building it rather than inheriting it

Success Looks Like

90 Days: You've run at least one vendor evaluation from first call to a recommendation the team acts on. The CRM is clean enough that pipeline is accurate and the SDR team spends less time fighting it.

1 Year: Footprint has data in production it could not access when you started, including at least one source that was never for sale. Cost of acquisition, lifetime value and event-attributed pipeline are standing numbers, measured the same way each month, and leadership pulls them without asking you. Vendor spend is a budget you own, with a defensible view of what each source is worth. Next year's headcount and budget plan was built off your work.

Why Join Footprint

  • Massive impact, fast: You'll work on projects that shape company direction, not analysis that gets shelved.

  • Own meaningful work: From day one, you'll have direct ownership over strategic initiatives that drive the business forward.

  • Real growth opportunity: Promotion timelines depend on performance: the harder you work, the quicker you'll get promoted.

  • Winning team and culture: We're a fast-moving, no-BS team that likes to win (and have fun doing it).

Benefits

  • 💰 Generous compensation and equity packages

  • 🍽 Free lunch and dinner (after 7pm)

  • 💪 Monthly wellness stipend

  • 🏖 Unlimited PTO

  • 🏥 Fully covered health, dental, and vision insurance

  • 🚀 The chance to help shape the future of internet identity and financial crime prevention

How we rate this

Founding Strategy & Ops at Footprint rates 65 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Open the description and count.

Prepare for this job

A free preview built only from this posting: what it asks for, what you could be asked in an interview, and how to adjust your resume.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

AI agentsStrategyOperationsData AcquisitionVendor NegotiationFinancial AnalysisPythonSQL

Questions you could be asked

  1. How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
  2. Tell me about a project where strategy was part of your work. What did you do?
  3. Tell me about a project where operations was part of your work. What did you do?
  4. Tell me about a project where data acquisition was part of your work. What did you do?
  5. Tell me about a project where vendor negotiation was part of your work. What did you do?

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: AI agents, Strategy, Operations, Data Acquisition, and Vendor Negotiation. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
  • Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project. This role expects it to be a running habit.

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