Innovation Associate

You are here to build AI-first solutions. Products and systems that make painful work disappear for the humans who have to do it. The output will take the form of software, agents, scripts, analytical systems, and whatever we end up calling these things next. The form matters less than the outcome.

This is not a build-to-spec role. There is no ticket queue. Your job is to sit in the customer's chair, learn where it hurts, name the pain clearly, and iterate toward solutions that are easy to implement, easy to understand, and deliver real value exactly where the pain is.

AI shows up two ways in what you build, and you will learn to operate fluently in both. You use AI as leverage while you build: Claude, Cursor, agent frameworks, and whatever tools the moment calls for. And you use AI as part of the solution itself: conversational analytics, psychometrics, ML, agents that do work humans used to have to do by hand.

This is not vibe coding. Vibe coding is prompt-and-pray. AI-first solutions are deterministic, user-centered, and built by people who care more about the customer's outcome than about the elegance of their own code.

• Sit with the user (real clients, real internal operators, real problems) until you understand what hurts and why.
• Design solutions that remove the pain with the least possible friction. If the user has to read a manual, you failed.
• Match the technique to the problem. LLM, classifier, retrieval, psychometric model, agent, deterministic logic: the right answer is whichever one delivers the outcome.
• Build real products that go into real hands. Ship them. Watch them work. Fix what does not.
• Contribute to Cortado's internal platforms, agent systems, and research tools, the systems we bet the firm on.
• Use AI as leverage throughout. Write less code by hand than any engineer before you has written, and ship more of it.

This role requires high EQ and high IQ in the same person. That is a rare combination and we are serious about both.

• High EQ. You can sit across from a stranger, listen, and actually hear what they are saying, including the part they are not saying out loud. You feel other people's friction. You want to remove it.
• High IQ. You can think abstractly, decompose problems, and learn complex technical material quickly. You are comfortable in the space between "I don't understand this yet" and "I understand it now."
• You are comfortable being uncomfortable. You are about to be taught things you did not know you did not know.
• You have built something, somewhere. A project, a script, a site, a bot, a tool. It does not have to be impressive. It has to be real.
• You use AI daily and have opinions about it, even if those opinions are still forming.
• You are willing to work through the gauntlet. We hire on evidence.

How to sit in a customer's chair until you can feel their problem as your own. How to translate that feeling into a solution that is easy to implement, easy to understand, and lands value right where it hurts. How to tell when a problem calls for an LLM, a classifier, a retrieval system, a psychometric model, an agent, or plain deterministic code, and how to match the tool to the outcome.

Much of what you will learn here is not yet written down anywhere, because the firm is actively working it out. You will be part of working it out.

We're an AI-fueled consultancy run by ex-C-suite operators. Our partners have spent careers figuring out what good looks like, and that judgment is encoded into how we work: playbooks, workflows, and AI tools pointed at real client engagements where the decisions move real money.

You will be in rooms with partners who have run companies. You will be in front of C-suite clients whose decisions move millions. You will be making calls faster than you feel ready to make them. This happens early, and it happens on purpose.

The people who thrive here chase being uncomfortable. That is the sensation of actually growing. Our alumni who started where you're starting are now running teams of their own.

We'll help you use AI in ways you never considered, and help you rethink your profession through AI that takes away the drudgery and puts the focus back on creativity.

Not a political seat. Execution is the coin of the realm here. That is a gift if you're good and a problem if you're not, and there is nowhere to hide either way.

Not a craftsman's workshop. If your reflex is to build your own version of everything and never share it, this will make you miserable. If your reflex is to build once, build it well, and make sure it comes home so the next person moves faster, welcome.