Entrepreneur in Residence

Pepper (https://www.pepper.inc/) is an AI-native marketing services company redefining how enterprise brands scale organic growth through a unified blend of strategy, creative talent, technology, and automation. We are building an AI-powered marketing services engine that seamlessly combines top global creative talent with proprietary workflows and automation to deliver measurable, scalable outcomes for modern CMOs.

Our platform and services bring together content, data, talent, and AI to help brands plan, create, manage, distribute, and measure high-impact marketing programs and all on one intelligent system designed for enterprise growth and efficiency.

Role Overview

We're hiring an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) into the Founder's Office at Pepper

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This is not a strategy seat. It's an operating seat.

We're looking for someone who has already carried the weight of a business. A founder who built and ran something, or an operator who has owned Ops, Strategy, or Customer Success end-to-end and been accountable for the number at the bottom. You'll work alongside the Founder/CEO and the central Centre of Excellence (COE) team, and you'll be handed the problems that matter most and are least defined: a business line that needs to be rebuilt, a function that needs an owner, a market that needs to be cracked, a manual process that needs to become an AI-first one.

You won't be given a playbook. You'll be expected to write one, run it, prove it works, and then hand it to someone else so you can go take the next thing.

Base location: Mumbai (in-office)

Shift: 12:00 PM – 9:00 PM IST

What You'll Own

• Take a business problem from zero to working. You'll be handed ambiguous, high-stakes mandates, a new revenue line, a broken unit economic, an underperforming segment, a market entry and own them outright. Diagnosis, plan, build, launch, iterate, results.
• Run functions that don't have an owner yet. Where something is founder-led, ad-hoc, or held together by heroics, you step in as interim owner: build the team, the process, and the metrics, stabilise it, then hand it over.
• Rebuild how work gets done with AI. Identify the highest-leverage workflows across Ops, CS, Delivery and GTM, and rebuild them AI-first. Partner with product and engineering to ship, then hold yourself to measurable impact on cost, speed, margin, and quality.
• Own customer outcomes where it counts. Get into live accounts — especially US enterprise — understand why customers stay or churn, fix retention and expansion mechanics at the root, and turn what you learn into product and process.
• Build the operating layer. Definitions, dashboards, reviews, and cadences that make performance legible. If the Founder can't see what's working within 24 hours of asking, that's your problem to fix.
• Be a genuine second pair of hands for the Founder. Diligence, fundraising material, pricing experiments, partnership evaluation, board prep, escalations — whatever the quarter demands.
• Build the bench. Hire, coach, and hand off. Success in this role is measured partly by how many things you've made someone else's job.

What We're Looking For

• 6–10 years of experience, with at least one of the following as your core story:
• You founded and ran a company. You raised or bootstrapped, hired, sold, shipped, and made payroll. Whether it exited, scaled, or shut down matters less than what you carried and what you learned.
• You've owned Ops, Strategy, or Customer Success at a high-growth company. A real function with a team, a budget, and a number you were held to. Not a supporting role in one
• Full-stack operating range. You can build the model, write the deck, sit in the QBR, debug the process, and get on the phone with an unhappy customer all in the same day. No task is beneath you and no problem is above you.
• Comfort with ambiguity that would paralyse most people. You're handed a sentence, not a brief. You come back with a plan.
• Commercial instinct. You think in margin, CAC, retention, and payback and not just activity and output.
• A real point of view on AI. You use LLMs, agents, and automation platforms daily, and you have an argument about how they change the shape of a services and marketplace business. Bonus if you've actually deployed AI into production workflows and can talk about what broke.
• Bias for shipping. A working v1 beats a perfect plan. You'd rather be corrected by the market than by a meeting.
• Sharp, structured communication. You can write a one-pager the board reads without questions, and a brief a frontline team can execute without a follow-up call.
• High ownership, low ego. You chase the hundredth detail without losing the plot, and you don't need credit to do the work.
• Prior exposure to US customers or teams is a strong plus.