The one-line version

Own the client and own the quality gate: run discovery, demonstrations, and delivery for fixed-scope artificial-intelligence document projects (six to eight weeks) with North American mid-market clients by day, and direct a Seoul engineering team that builds overnight.

Why this role exists right now

The product is built and demonstrated end to end, and a feedback round with senior industry operators, the kind of people who buy exactly this work, is underway. One piece of their advice came back louder than everything else: the person who delivers must be the person in the room, driving the screen, with a name and a face the client trusts. This posting is that advice, acted on.

So you arrive at an unusual moment: not to search for product-market fit from a blank page, but to carry a finished product into its first paid rooms and put your name on the result. The playbooks you write in the next twelve months become how this company works for the next ten years.

What the company does

Most artificial intelligence is built to generate. Ours is built for the moments when a company has to be right, in writing.

We build document-intelligence systems for United States mid-market companies in industries where a written answer is a commitment: it gets signed, audited, and relied on. Everything we make is designed to be checked rather than believed, and engagements run fixed-scope against acceptance criteria agreed with the client before kickoff. The full method, and the standard behind it, is shared under a non-disclosure agreement in the first conversation.

Client information stays exactly where it belongs by design. Clients scope and review in North American daytime; engineering happens overnight in Seoul. The venture is founded by two experienced operators and is currently in stealth.

What you'll actually do

Run the room in English. Discovery calls, the product demonstration (you drive, on your own screen), scoping, and the weekly cadence with buyers at the chief operating officer and chief financial officer level. You are the person in the room, and the person who says no to out-of-scope asks. Run the corpus check. Before any build, you run a structured diagnostic of the client's document base with the founders and decide together whether the client is ready to proceed, and how. Sometimes the honest answer is not yet, and you deliver that too, on a strict principle: the client authors, you structure and adjudicate. Run engineering in Korean. Decompose each build into written work packages a Seoul engineer can execute overnight without a meeting; review what comes back; hold the quality gate. Own “done.” Draft and defend acceptance criteria in the client's own numbers, fixed before kickoff, then hold the bar through delivery, including its hardest part: telling a client the honest answer when their documents cannot yet support what they hoped, and explaining why that honesty is the product working. Help build the firm. Every client call feeds a shared instrumentation log both founders read; your playbooks, templates, and judgment become the company's operating system. This is a founding role, not a seat.

Who this fits

Genuinely bilingual, both directions: client-grade English (credible in a tense discovery call, alone) AND business-grade Korean (a scope email a Seoul engineering lead executes without follow-up questions). Typically ten or more years of experience, but we care about the shape more than the length: you have owned external client relationships where the client was paying (and can name one that went sideways); you have run fixed-scope, defined-deliverable engagements end to end, the engagement-manager shape, whether at a consultancy, agency, or services firm; and clients trusted you alone in the room. Technically fluent enough to quality-check artificial-intelligence document workflows (retrieval, extraction, application programming interfaces) and to smell a wrong answer. You write documents that a smart reader with no context can execute cold. Our internal standard bans unexplained jargon and shorthand in every document we produce. If that sentence made you nod rather than wince, good. Comfortable selling: the founding-client motion runs through you. Canadian work authorization (permanent resident or citizen); Toronto-based or able to work on Toronto time. You might be: a 1.5-generation Korean-Canadian product manager or consultant; a Korea-raised professional whose Canadian market position undervalues your Korea experience; a Korea-desk alum of a consulting firm; or a product manager inside a Korean corporate's North American operation looking for a ground-floor seat.

The working rhythm: read this part twice

Evenings are when the model breathes. Most weekday evenings around 8pm Eastern Time you will run a working session with the Seoul engineering team as their day starts; plan on 30 to 45 minutes. Expect longer in the early weeks; it shortens as the project matures and as you and the engineers learn each other's shorthand. This handoff IS the follow-the-sun advantage, and it cannot be delegated to a document. The founders will be on these calls too, especially in the early months. You are not being handed a night shift; you are joining one. Scrappy is the job, not a phase. When a sprint is on the line, we put in the hours, founders included. In exchange, you get what no big-company product role offers: your judgment shapes the firm, your playbooks become its operating system, and the upside is real. If that trade energizes rather than exhausts you, you are our kind of person.

The honest structure

This is a fractional, contract-first engagement at a pre-revenue two-founder venture: no salary security, a paid first project that is both your trial of us and ours of you, and a defined path, on delivery, to the standing lead role with partner-level economics as the firm grows. If you need salary certainty right now, this is honestly not the right time. If you want a ground-floor seat in a North America-Korea corridor business where your bilingual capability is the core asset rather than a nice-to-have, we should talk.