Startup Generalist (New Grad)

ABOUT HYPHENATE Most AI companies are building copilots. Hyphenate is building the AI operating system for the CFO office. Our Audit-Ready AI Agents connect to a company's existing finance stack—ERPs, banks, billing, payroll, CRM, contracts, spreadsheets, email, and Slack—and automate the work behind the entire order-to-cash process, record-to-report process, treasury management, financial reporting, and audit readiness. The goal isn't to help the finance team write better prompts. The goal is for finance teams to review exceptions while AI does the rest. What makes Hyphenate different is our Unified Finance Context—a financial understanding layer that captures transactions, policies, contracts, historical decisions, and accounting judgment. On top of it sit Audit-Ready AI Agents that can reason, explain their decisions, escalate uncertainty, and continuously improve. We've raised $9M led by Foundation Capital, alongside BoldCap, Gaia Ventures, Aravind Srinivas (CEO of Perplexity), and finance leaders from Zuora, Ramp, Gusto, MongoDB, Zoom, and the Big Four. THE ROLE We can't tell you what you'll be doing six months from now. That's not vagueness—that's the job. You'll work directly with the founders on whatever matters most that week. Some weeks that means sitting with a controller at 9pm during close, watching which spreadsheet she opens first and why. Some weeks it's the ROI model that unblocks an enterprise deal. Some weeks it's the research piece that names a problem the whole industry has been quietly working around. We're defining a category that doesn't exist yet. Categories don't get defined by the product alone—they get defined by the arguments you make, the benchmarks you publish, the rooms you get people into, and the language the market ends up borrowing from you. That work needs an owner. It doesn't need a specialist. WHAT THE WORK ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE Learn how finance teams really work. Sit in on sales calls, implementations, and support threads. Visit customers. Watch a close happen end to end. Read every piece of feedback we get. Nobody at Hyphenate is more valuable than the person who understands the customer best—and that spot is open. Sharpen how we decide. Size a market. Pull apart a competitor's pricing. Interview ten controllers and turn it into a point of view we didn't have. Build the board deck. Write the memo that settles an argument. Build things. Not just recommend them. Prototype the internal tool with Claude. Run the pricing analysis. Ship the customer event. Launch the research report. Stand up the metrics dashboard nobody else has time for. Help define the category. Original research, customer stories, founder content, conference talks, and relationships across the accounting and finance world. We want to be a company people learn from, not just buy from. PROBLEMS WORTH YOUR BRAIN - How do you price software that replaces work instead of tooling? Seat-based pricing breaks when the product does the job instead of helping someone do it. - How do you prove ROI for an agent? Finance teams buy on evidence. What's the honest, defensible number, and how do you get it? - What actually makes a controller trust software? Not a demo. Something else. Go find out what. - How do you turn fifty scattered customer conversations into one decision? Synthesis is a skill. Most people are bad at it. - How do you build a category from nothing? Nobody is searching for "Audit-Ready AI for Finance" yet. Change that. A FEW STRONG OPINIONS - The generalist who can build beats three who can only recommend. Fluency with Claude and other AI tools isn't a bonus here—it's how one person does the work of a team. You should be automating your own job by month three. - Writing is thinking. We'd rather read a sharp two-page memo than sit through a twenty-slide deck. If you can't write it clearly, you don't understand it yet. - The accountant + engineer loop is the moat. The people who sit with controllers and build from what they see compound faster than the ones who don't. That includes you. - We hire for slope, not intercept. How fast you learn matters more than what you already know. We'd rather teach you finance than teach you how to think. - Titles here are temporary. Where this role goes in two years depends almost entirely on what you turn out to be good at. Several of the best jobs at this company don't exist yet. WHO YOU ARE We care much more about how you think than what's on your résumé. - Zero to two years of experience, or finishing your degree now. Any field. - You've done something analytical and hard. Consulting, banking, product, engineering, research, journalism, a startup—or you've built and run something on your own. Both count equally. - You write clearly. This is the filter that matters most. Clear writing is the visible output of clear thinking. - You use AI to do real work. Not as a novelty. You've built something with Claude, or automated a process, or gotten an agent to do something genuinely useful. - You're unusually curious. You're the person who goes three levels deeper than the question required, because you couldn't help it. - You want responsibility earlier than is comfortable. You'll get it. You don't need a finance background. You don't need an AI background. You need to be someone who gets obsessed with things. YOU'LL STAND OUT IF - You've shipped something real without an engineer—a tool, an automation, a product, a business. - You've written something publicly that people actually read. - You've worked at a startup under thirty people and liked the chaos. - You have an accounting or finance background—Big Four, audit, FP&A, controllership. That's rarer than you'd think and unusually valuable here. - You studied something quantitative and you can write. That combination is the whole job. - You've run something end to end where nobody was checking your work. - You're curious about how money actually moves. WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE AFTER A YEAR - You're one of the first people the founders pull into a hard decision. - Customers ask for you by name, because you've spent real time learning from them. - You've launched at least two things that didn't exist when you joined. - You've written something you'd put your name on publicly—and we published it. - You've had more ownership than most people get in five years somewhere larger. THIS PROBABLY ISN'T FOR YOU IF - You want a defined scope and a clear ladder. Neither exists here yet. - You'd rather analyze the decision than own the outcome. - You want to work remotely. This role in particular is learned by proximity. - You need the work to be interesting on day one. Some of it is unglamorous, and the unglamorous parts are often where the leverage is. THE UPSIDE - Direct, daily access to founders, customers, CFOs, controllers, and investors. - Competitive pay and meaningful early-stage equity. - Full medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents, plus 401(k) match. - Meals, a stocked NYC office, and the chance to help define an entirely new category: Audit-Ready AI for Finance. THE DETAILS - In-person in New York City. Five days a week, in the same room as the founders. That's the point of the job. - This is an early-career role by design. We're hiring for trajectory, not for a résumé.