Founding AI Operations Lead Project Avella · Full time · Remote (Eastern Time overlap) · $70,000 to $100,000 CAD plus equity THE PROJECT Avella is the project name for what we are building: a live SaaS product that runs the entire backend of an ecommerce store, orders, returns, chargebacks, inventory, reporting, and every customer conversation, with human judgment built in exactly where it matters. Support software helps teams answer tickets faster. We are building the thing that makes the department optional.

The system already runs a real brand in production, and our first flagship client deployment is underway. The product clients log into, the dashboard, the automation engine, the approval rails, is what you will help build. WHY THIS SWING IS WORTH TAKING Support software is a crowded $12 billion market racing to a dollar a ticket.

The labor market next to it, the work itself, is worth roughly $500 billion and has barely moved. We sell the outcome, not the tool

Klarna replaced its support team with AI, then publicly hired humans back. Unsupervised AI support fails. Supervised autonomy, AI throughput with human sign-off on every judgment call, is the architecture that wins, and it is what we built The category is young and the flagship deployment is already in motion. You are joining before the curve, not after it THE ROLE Founding team. Half building the product, half running it live in production.

You will build Avella with the founder: the Claude-powered automation engine, approval gates and evals, the client dashboard, onboarding flows, everything that turns a working system into a SaaS product any brand can run. AI writes most of the code here. You direct it, review it, and own what ships. You will also run our flagship client deployment.

That means operating the product on real traffic: reviewing and approving AI-drafted customer replies, handling escalations, keeping the Shopify store clean, and being the named face the client sees in Slack. Running production is not a chore next to the product work. It is how the product gets built.

WHAT YOU WILL DO Build the product's automation core: new workflows, approval gates, prompts, and evals

Ship the product surface:



client dashboard, onboarding, reporting, playbooks

Run the flagship deployment end to end: Shopify admin, order and returns flow, escalations, weekly executive reports

Review and approve AI-drafted customer replies; own the judgment calls the system holds for a human

Act as the client's named point of contact and keep them confident and informed

Join sales calls and operations audits with prospective clients and demo the platform live THE STACK YOU WILL RUN Claude: Claude Code, the Claude API, MCP connectors, and scheduled cloud runs. The whole product runs on it

GitHub: our repos are the source of truth for product behavior, and GitHub Actions runs our scheduled jobs

Railway: where the product is hosted. Deploys, setting variables, logs

Slack: the operations HQ. Approvals, escalations, client channels, and every system report

Shopify: the admin day to day, plus the GraphQL Admin API

Google Sheets and Drive: trackers and reports, including service-account access

Node.js or Python for glue code, and REST or GraphQL APIs generally You do not need to be a career software engineer. You do need to be comfortable in git, able to read and debug AI-written code, and able to direct Claude Code to build things and verify what it produces.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR The signal we weight most: you have built a chatbot or AI system that real people used. Lead with that. You have built and shipped chatbots or AI-powered systems, ideally with Claude (the API, agent frameworks, or Claude Code), and you can show your work

You are fluent in the stack above, or close enough that the gaps close in weeks, not months

Hands-on Shopify experience on the admin side: orders, refunds, apps, day-to-day store operations

Customer service experience for an ecommerce brand:



you have worked a real support queue and know what good looks like

Sales comfort: you can run a call with a founder, demo a system, and write follow-ups that close

Sharp written English: you will write in client brand voices every day

Process discipline: the platform holds money decisions for humans and runs on strict approval gates, and you have to respect the rails WHO THIS FITS The closest name the market has for this job is a forward deployed engineer: someone who builds inside a live customer environment and turns what works into product. This is that job at founding scale, for ecommerce.

You are probably one of these people: An AI automation builder at an agency or freelancing, shipping Claude or GPT systems for clients, ready to go deep on one product instead of twenty retainers A technical CX or ecommerce operations lead at a Shopify brand who automated their own job and wants to build that as the product An early-startup generalist who has shipped an AI project end to end and wants a founding seat with a live client from day one Two honest filters. This is half engineering and half operations, and people who want only one half are unhappy here. And if you have never gotten an LLM to do something reliable in production, this is not your role yet.

NICE TO HAVE DTC or drop-model commerce experience

Klaviyo, ManyChat, Slack-based operations, GitHub Actions

Experience writing evals or QA harnesses for LLM systems HOW WE WORK Right now it is one founder and a working product. You are hire one. Everything runs through Slack, AI drafts and humans approve, and money decisions are always made by a person.

You get real ownership from day one: the flagship deployment is yours to run and the product is yours to shape. DETAILS Full time, remote, with Eastern Time working overlap

$70,000 to $100,000 CAD per year depending on experience, plus equity

Founding-team seat at a startup. The equity is meant to matter

Start as soon as possible TO APPLY Include a link to an AI system or chatbot you built and two sentences on what it did in production. We read build samples before resumes.

📌 AI Operations Lead (Canada)
🏢 Galore Apparel
📍 Canada