Founder’s Associate to the CTO - Strategic Projects & R&D Operations

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About the role

Work directly with Brightpick’s co-founder and CTO on some of the hardest technical, product, and organizational problems inside a 100+ person robotics R&D organization.

Your job is to turn ambitious, sometimes unstructured priorities into clear decisions, accountable owners, coordinated execution, and completed outcomes across software, hardware, mechatronics, QA, DevOps, product, delivery, and adjacent business teams.

Brightpick moves unusually fast. A six-person team recently delivered the software for a new robot in eight weeks. We want to scale that end-to-end, AI-native way of working without burying teams in process.

This is not a personal-assistant role or a classic project-management job. It is a hands-on operator role with direct founder exposure, real responsibility, intensive learning, and a deliberate path toward owning a major initiative, product area, R&D program, or operating function. We are looking for exceptional potential—not someone who has already mastered every part of the role.

Location
Bratislava

Type of employment
Full-time

Salary (brutto)
From €2,000/month based on your experience and skills

What you’ll help drive—and increasingly own

Your scope will grow as you learn the company and earn trust. At first, you will work closely with the CTO and responsible leaders, helping several important topics move forward. You will take direct ownership of selected initiatives—not every topic at once—and progress toward larger, more independent outcomes over time.

• Turn CTO and R&D priorities into clear initiatives, decisions, owners, dependencies, next steps, and completed outcomes.
• Create lightweight visibility across critical work and surface stalled decisions, risks, or cross-team gaps early.
• Drive selected ambiguous, cross-functional projects from analysis and scoping through execution, testing, acceptance, and handover.
• Prepare concise decision briefs and high-value leadership reviews; ensure that decisions become action.
• Help strong experts improve more topics without taking work back from the responsible owners.
• Turn holistic expert judgment into useful questions, system maps, decision tools, experiments, and guardrails that teams can apply independently.
• Improve how teams work with modern AI agents; prototype useful scripts, automations, context practices, or operating routines instead of adding bureaucracy.
• Help teams distinguish fast discovery from production delivery and from work requiring strict safety or reliability evidence.
• Support the strengthening of Brightpick’s talent pipeline through collaboration with the HR team on selected university relationships, technical events, challenges, and targeted recruiting initiatives.

What makes you a strong fit

This is a deliberately ambitious profile, but it is not a day-one checklist. We are searching for someone with exceptional potential: a person with unusual learning speed, energy, curiosity, and the ambition to grow. Some capabilities should already be visible in what you have done; others can be developed through direct coaching and real work in the role. You:

• learn exceptionally fast and can form a useful model of an unfamiliar technical or business topic from incomplete information.
• naturally think across the whole system—people, product, software, hardware, process, operations, and business consequences.
• can predict likely consequences and failure paths while remaining willing to update your view when evidence changes.
• show high agency and follow-through, and you want to become someone who can reliably move difficult topics to closure.
• bring a recommendation rather than only descr ibing a problem.
• know when to decide independently, when to challenge, and when risk requires alignment or escalation.
• can challenge senior people respectfully, handle disagreement, and influence without formal authority.
• communicate clearly and concisely in English.
• are excited to become an exceptional user of modern AI agents. You do not need to arrive as an expert: you will have access to frontier tools and hands-on guidance from highly experienced AI-native builders inside Brightpick. You should bring curiosity, experimentation, and the discipline to verify outputs rather than trust confident answers or agent consensus.
• protect confidential information, build trust, and operate with low ego and high integrity.
• can show evidence of something you built, improved, organized, or led from a vague start to a real result.

Your experience may come from engineering, science, economics, consulting, product, operations—or a path we have not listed. We care more about learning speed, energy, judgment, evidence of initiative, and growth potential than a particular degree, employer, number of years, or a perfect match against every bullet.

How you’ll work

Some weeks will center on strategy, product questions, and decision preparation. Others will involve project execution, follow-ups, data gathering, technical events, workflow automation, or hands-on problem-solving. The common thread is moving important work forward.

You will work closely with strong technical and business leaders. Your responsibility is not to become a messenger for the CTO or take ownership away from teams. You will help the right people make better decisions, preserve clear accountability, and close the loop.

You will not be left alone with a list of extraordinary expectations. The CTO and other experienced leaders will help you build context, challenge your reasoning, teach the relevant mental models, and gradually expand your decision rights. In return, we expect intensity, openness to feedback, and visible growth.

Brightpick is building an agent-native way of working. We use AI not only to generate code or documents, but to help people understand unfamiliar systems, transfer context, test ideas, and work across traditional role boundaries. Human judgment, responsible ownership, evidence, and physical validation remain essential.

What success can look like

These are directions for growth, not outcomes you must own alone or achieve immediately. With support from the CTO, expert reviewers, and responsible teams, within your first year:

• important CTO and R&D initiatives have clearer ownership, decisions, and reliable closure;
• you progress from supporting important cross-functional work to independently owning selected initiatives;
• dependencies and risks reach decision-makers earlier;
• selected teams use practical AI-enabled workflows that improve speed or quality;
• strong experts can guide more topics without becoming their operational owners;
• topic owners increasingly apply the relevant mental models without repeated intervention;
• you are ready to move toward ownership of a substantial program, product, or function.

Why this role is different

This role is designed as an accelerator, not a permanent support position. You will receive unusually broad exposure to robotics, software, hardware, product, AI-enabled work, organizational design, and company decision-making. More importantly, you will receive direct feedback, access to frontier tools, and help turning that exposure into real capability, outcomes, and increasing independent ownership.

As you build trust and demonstrate results, your scope can grow toward a major product, R&D program, AI-transformation initiative, talent program, or operating function based on your strengths and Brightpick’s needs.

How to stand out

In your application, tell us about one thing you built, fixed, improved, organized, or led end to end. Please explain:

• the messy starting point;
• the most important decisions you made;
• the obstacles or disagreements you encountered;
• the result and how you know it worked;
• what you would do differently now.

Links to projects, prototypes, analyses, automations, technical work, events, or other concrete evidence are welcome.

Benefits:

• Daily breakfast in the office
• Option of working from home/hybrid work (in case the position allows it)
• Flexible work schedule (in case the position allows it)
• Sick days
• Parking for everyone, bike storage with showers and changing rooms on site at our HQ
• Rooftop terrace with nice view of Bratislava
• Dog friendly office
• Multisport Card
• Referral program

Additional benefits you can choose from after 1st year:

• Multisport Card (with company contribution)
• Contribution to a recreation stay
• Year-round healthcare access at ProCare
• Supplementary pension contribution (III pilier)
• Brain boost - budget for professional development
• Annual public transportation pass
• E-Shop voucher to buy anything you might need