Founders Associate Intern: AI Product Consultant (m/w/d)

We are building the AI platform for procurement.

Procurement manages the largest cost in enterprises. With tools from the past, trying to find savings in scattered data systems. Increasing cost pressure puts CPOs on the spot to change this.

Our integrated AI agents autonomously run negotiations, ensure contracted savings actually reach the bottom line, and add intelligence to boring, manual tasks.

We don’t shy away from tapping into complex data and add intelligence that changes the economics of procurement, moving far beyond simple agentic workflows.

We are funded by top tier VCs (10x and Plug and Play) and business angels, and our founders have strategy consulting and high growth startup experience.

We are three friends that have known each other for years. We have fun while moving quickly, and care about real outcomes.

Tasks

You're a Swiss Army knife: technically fluent and brilliant with customers, energized switching between topics five times a day. One hour you're across the table from a CPO making our AI click; the next you're in the product, debugging why an agent didn't deliver and shaping the fix.

You want to turn an "interesting AI demo" into a signed enterprise contract with proven value, and you refuse to let great ideas die in translation between customers and techies. This is a Founders Associate role in the truest sense: you work shoulder-to-shoulder with the founders, responsible for Customers and Product, with a front-row seat to how an enterprise AI company actually gets built, and real ownership of product and customer relationships from day one. You'll learn directly from founders who've built and scaled before.

You sit at the intersection of product, sales, and the customer, working directly with the founders. Concretely:

• Build demos that make CPOs lean forward. You craft sharp, tailored demos that turn our agents' capabilities into an obvious "we need this," built around the prospect's real data and real pain, not a generic walkthrough.
• Drive Proof of Values to success. You support the POV from kickoff to outcome: define what "success" means up front, keep the customer engaged, debug what isn't working, and land a business case the customer can defend internally.
• Run product discovery end to end. You prepare customer interviews to uncover what procurement teams actually need, map the competitive landscape so we know exactly where we win, and translate both into crisp feature requirements for the tech team.
• Identify where our customers fumble. You use modern product management techniques to identify where customers currently encounter bottlenecks and write briefs for our engineers to fix them.

Requirements

We don't believe in perfect candidates or rigid checklists. We care about drive, curiosity, and the ability to build. The points below are a guide, not a gate.

Must-haves

• Motivation. Highly motivated, thrives in ambiguity, adapts fast. Study field doesn't matter.
• Customer first. You instinctively put the customer first and build real, working relationships with people.
• Technical fluency. You don't need to build our platform, but you must understand the constraints of LLMs like context windows, RAG, and tool calling. You know prompt engineering is only the start, and you're comfortable digging into logs to understand why a workflow failed.
• Storyteller. You can take something complex and make a room full of skeptical buyers believe in it.
• AI-native. You reach for AI to accelerate your own work, experiment constantly, and share what actually works.

Nice-to-have

• First experience in Consulting, Strategy, Product, or Engineering is a plus.

Benefits

As an intern at qado you get real impact and real ownership. We hold interns to the same bar as full-time hires, so we only bring on people we trust to run projects independently and want to work with long-term.

• Work directly with the founders. You're a sparring partner to the founders, not layers down. You'll see, and influence, how the company is run.
• Real ownership, fast. Your demos, features, and POVs go live and in front of real enterprise customers from week one.
• Steep learning curve. An honest, front-row look at what it takes to build one of the most ambitious AI companies in procurement, across product, sales, and tech.
• Go deeply AI-native. Inside an AI company you'll use and shape frontier tools every day, and walk away fluent in how enterprises actually adopt them.
• Tools: High end hardware and your preferred productivity tools (Copilot, Cursor, etc.; we pay for whatever makes you productive).
• Flexibility: Munich-based with a hybrid setup.
• Mentorship: Direct, hands-on collaboration with experienced founders who invest in your development.
• Fair pay & a real future: Solid internship compensation and a clear prospect of full-time conversion and early leadership responsibility for the right person.

We’re an AI-native startup based in Munich, and we’re building a business in a massive, previously overlooked market. As part of our small, fast-growing team, you’ll be right in the thick of things from the very start. Day in and day out, you’ll work directly with the founders, take on real responsibility rather than just doing menial tasks, and gain insight into all areas of the business, from sales and strategy to product development.

qado is the next-generation cost management software for procurement teams.

We focus on AI use cases that deliver real cost savings, not just process efficiency. We combine quote and contract intelligence with spend and market analytics, so buyers can negotiate more, negotiate better, and get more value from existing supplier relationships.

Therewith we:
Connect deal knowledge, market intelligence, and spend data
Act on missed savings opportunities in real time
Consistently optimize prices
Leverage every discount
Enforce contract penalties

... and much more!