Founding Operations Lead

Ficus • New York City, NY

3d

About The Position

Ficus is building modern payout infrastructure for life insurance carriers. Today, when someone loses a loved one, the financial experience that follows is often slow, confusing, and outdated. Beneficiaries may receive paper checks, unclear instructions, fragmented communications, and limited flexibility in how they access funds. Insurers, meanwhile, are stuck with legacy banking integrations, manual workflows, compliance constraints, and outdated retained asset account infrastructure. We are building the platform that helps insurers deliver a dramatically better beneficiary payout experience — including retained asset accounts, debit card access, checks, digital onboarding, beneficiary communications, and modern money movement through partner banks. This is a large, overlooked, regulated market with real customer pain, real enterprise demand, and the opportunity to become core infrastructure for how insurance benefits are paid out. We have raised from Founder Collective and BTV, and have signed a contract with one of the largest life insurance carriers in the United States. We are looking for highly driven, AI-pilled engineers to join us on this mission and be a core part of our founding team. Our Team Daniel Nissenbaum (CEO): Daniel was previously co-founder and CTO of Alinea, a Series A consumer investing app for Gen Z, which he helped scale to over 2M+ users and a $20M run rate. Before Alinea, he was a software engineer at JPMorgan Chase. Terry Angelos (Co-founder): Terry is a lifelong fintech entrepreneur. He founded Trialpay which was acquired by Visa. He then stayed on to lead Visa's strategy across fintech partnerships and digital assets as the Head of Fintech and Crypto. Terry was also formerly CEO of DriveWealth, a Series D brokerage infrastructure platform powering investing experiences for fintechs around the world. About the Role We’re hiring a Founding Operations Lead to work directly with the founders and help turn Ficus from an early product into a fully operational business. This is a broad, high-ownership role for an unusually capable generalist. You'll report directly to the CEO, and work across every part of the business: standing up customer support, running diligence with banks and vendors, supporting fundraising, and solving the dozens of unglamorous problems that come with launching a regulated fintech product. The exact work will change as the company grows. What will remain constant is that you’ll be expected to learn quickly, bring structure to ambiguous problems, communicate effectively with many kinds of people, and do what it takes to get important work over the finish line.

Requirements

• Exceptionally sharp and can quickly understand unfamiliar industries, systems, and business problems.
• Strong bias toward action and consistently bring work all the way to completion.
• Communicate clearly and confidently with everyone from customers and vendors to bank executives and prospective hires.
• Resourceful. When there is no obvious answer or established process, you figure out a path forward.
• Organized and detail-oriented enough to manage complex processes involving multiple external parties and important deadlines.
• Willing to work hard, move quickly, and take on whatever the company most needs—even when the work falls outside a conventional job description.
• Low ego, high standards, and good judgment about when to ask for help versus when to independently make progress.
• Want to be early and are energized by responsibility, ambiguity, and the opportunity to help shape a company from the ground up.

Responsibilities

• Help operationalize our first carrier launch, coordinating across insurers, banks, vendors, product, compliance, and internal teams.
• Build our customer support operation from scratch, including workflows, tooling, policies, escalation paths, and quality standards.
• Manage diligence and onboarding processes with partner banks, insurers, and critical vendors.
• Research, evaluate, and implement operational partners for areas such as check fulfillment, card programs, payments, identity verification, and customer communications.
• Build financial and operational models to support product, pricing, fundraising, and company planning.
• Create clear processes, documentation, and internal controls for workflows that initially have no playbook.
• Help with recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, and other people-related needs as the team grows.
• Support fundraising and investor diligence through research, analysis, materials, and process management.
• Take ownership of the unexpected day-to-day problems that arise while launching a regulated financial product.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed