Founding Operations Lead

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Today, when someone loses a loved one, the financial experience that follows is often slow, confusing, and outdated.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 Insurers, meanwhile, are stuck with legacy banking integrations, manual workflows, compliance constraints, and outdated retained asset account infrastructure.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.

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.

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.

• 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.

• You are exceptionally sharp and can quickly understand unfamiliar industries, systems, and business problems.

• You have a strong bias toward action and consistently bring work all the way to completion.

• You communicate clearly and confidently with everyone from customers and vendors to bank executives and prospective hires.

• You are resourceful. When there is no obvious answer or established process, you figure out a path forward.

• You are organized and detail-oriented enough to manage complex processes involving multiple external parties and important deadlines.

• You are willing to work hard, move quickly, and take on whatever the company most needs—even when the work falls outside a conventional job description.

• You have low ego, high standards, and good judgment about when to ask for help versus when to independently make progress.

• You want to be early and are energized by responsibility, ambiguity, and the opportunity to help shape a company from the ground up.

Ficus is taking on a $30B legacy monopoly in one of the most overlooked corners of financial infrastructure: how life insurance benefits are paid out.

This is a massive, under-modernized market with real enterprise demand, entrenched incumbents, and a clear opportunity to build a category-defining company. The work is both technically deep and deeply human: modernizing the infrastructure behind one of the most important financial moments in a person’s life.

You’ll be joining a seasoned fintech founding team with the scar tissue to know what matters: how to ship quickly, sell into regulated enterprises, navigate financial infrastructure, and build products people actually trust.

As one of the earliest team members, you’ll have real ownership from day one across customer launches, banking and vendor partnerships, operations, customer support, hiring, and fundraising. You won’t be executing an established playbook—you’ll help create it.

If you aspire to one day become a founder, Head of Ops or COO, this role offers a front-row seat to the full company-building journey: launching a product, serving enterprise customers, navigating regulated partnerships, raising capital, and scaling a team. You won’t just help run the business—you’ll help define how it is built.