Founder Associate (gn) @ Photonic Chip Venture, Besançon, France

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Photonic Chip Venture in Besançon is seeking a Founder Associate to work with the CEO. You will own operations across sales, lead generation, pre‑sales, budget and grants, HR, and facilities, while building repeatable processes and automating them with the tools. You’ll support hiring, lab ops, monitor trends, and help organize investor updates. The ideal candidate is entrepreneurial, loves building scalable systems, and is fluent in French and English. To apply, show concrete SOPs and automation wins, cross‑functional impact, and a clear why photonics and Besançon; highlight startup or lab exposure and express readiness to own outcomes from day one and interest in continuing with Lightspring afterward.

This is an Atlantic portfolio company.

About the Venture

We are building the photonic PCB, the piece of technology that takes integrated photonics to scale. After a decade of research into using light to move and manipulate information at the micrometer scale, we found that optical integration was the main bottleneck for building high-performance optical chips, so we set out to solve it. Our 3D optical interconnect solutions connect individual photonic components into working systems, and that work sits underneath the next wave of progress in AI, computing, sensing, and telecommunications. We think optical integration is one of the most important problems in photonics today, and we are building the foundation that future innovation can rest on.

About the Role

This is an early-stage role, working hand-in-hand with the CEO. New problems come up every day and need to be solved quickly, and at the same time we need to build the processes that let us run and grow properly. You will move between both, solving what is in front of you today and building the systems that make tomorrow easier. It is a broad role with a lot of ownership and a close view of how a deeptech company is built from the ground up.

What you'll do

• Set up the processes that run day-to-day operations, across sales and lead generation, pre-sales and technical use case exploration, budget and grants management, and HR and admin

• Automate these processes as much as possible using the right tools and AI agents

• Coordinate and support hiring alongside the team

• Help develop and monitor our office and technical facilities, including the fabrication clean room and lab, to a high standard

• Track competitors, industry trends such as photonics market reports, and customer feedback

• Support investor relationships, reporting, and updates to our funding strategy

• Keep internal knowledge organised, including SOPs, meeting notes, decisions, and a feedback log

• Support communication and content, from LinkedIn posts and newsletters to partnership outreach

About You

You are drawn to entrepreneurship and want to learn first-hand what it takes to build a company. You like solving problems across a wide range of topics, you would rather build a system than do the same task twice, and you enjoy setting things up so they work well in the future.

• You like working across many different types of problem, from operations to outreach to facilities

• You prefer building repeatable processes over repeating manual work

• You think about the future and set things up to scale

• You have full professional proficiency in both French and English

Why Join

You will have direct access to founder decision-making, which is rare at this stage, and a close view of how an early-stage deeptech company actually runs. You will work across a genuinely unusual technical environment, spanning clean room, lab, and industrial settings, and take on real ownership from the start. There is also the opportunity to continue with Lightspring in an operations role once the internship ends.