Founding Community & Partnerships Lead

An adaptive training coach to help runners, cyclists, and triathletes set and achieve goals. It adapts your training, recovery, and nutrition to how your body is actually responding.

We're building the best way to:

1. set goals in collaboration with the coach
2. build a long-term plan to achieve the goal
3. iterate on the plan as life happens and as athletes progress
4. guide athletes towards achieving their goals

We've already built the best way to prompt for hiking, running, and cycling routes with Imperfect Routes.

Our athletes are training from everything between doing their first 10k to winning a 50 mile, international ultra trail marathon.

Imperfect is a training coach that adapts to how an athlete's body and life are actually going. You'd work with running, cycling, and swim clubs and local events to grow Imperfect into an important part of an athlete's training: setting a goal, building a plan, finding a route, and receiving recommendations.

We're five people. You'd be the sixth, working with me, the founder, in SF.

You should enjoy hiking, running, cycling, and traveling. A big part of the work will be attending running and cycling clubs. We have to connect on a human level if we're to embrace people's imperfections and go beyond the AI noise we all see on a daily basis.

Here's what you should expect for the first three months:

Month 1

Speak with run, bike, and swim clubs. You and I will attend as many as feasible. Reach out to local events to see how we can partner with them. Get their feedback and incorporate it into the product. Focus on collaboration for online content creation. Establish a steady cadence of content on TikTok, IG Reels, and YT Shorts.

Month 2

Work with partners (clubs and events) and athletes for them to establish a cadence of producing content showing how they and their communities use Imperfect.

Month 3

Turn the athletes who've been showing up into ambassadors: they run the club nights and events in their city, you run them. By month three the community grows without you in the room.

San Francisco, in person two or three days a week. Salary and equity are above. Equity vests monthly over four years with a one-year cliff.

I'm an ultramarathoner who previously started and sold two companies backed by investors like a16z and Stripe. I also built the most used open source project to pull Garmin Health data, downloaded over 350k times a month and used by Stanford Health.

Python and FastAPI on the backend, Flutter on mobile, Next.js on the web. Postgres and Redis for data, Render for hosting, Logfire for tracing. Claude does the coaching, Gemini Flash the fast paths, GPT the embeddings and voice.

Imperfect Routes is the part we've already solved: ask for a 20 mi trail loop with 3k ft of climbing starting at your door and you get a real route back, streaming. That's the same problem as coaching at a horizon of seconds. The coaching loop is the same problem at a horizon of 20 weeks, and that part is open.

1. Getting a real goal out of a conversation. "I want to run a marathon" isn't a goal. Which race, what date, what does your history actually support, what do you care about. The coach has to know when it has enough to commit and when to keep asking, without becoming an intake form.
2. Writing a plan that holds up for 20 weeks. Plans are prose, because that's what models write natively and what athletes read. A plan has to be right in week 1 and week 18 at once, periodized for one specific person, and rewritable every week without losing the arc.
3. Knowing how much to change, and when. This is the whole bet. You slept 4 hours, you're sick, you're 9 time zones off, you crushed Tuesday harder than prescribed. Adjust too eagerly and the plan feels random and the athlete stops trusting it. Adjust too little and we're the 16-week PDF we exist to replace. We're still figuring this out.
4. Proving any of it is right. There's no ground truth for the correct workout after a red-eye on four hours of sleep. We run evals against real training histories and read a lot of traces. Eval design for coaching quality is one of the most interesting open problems here.
5. Forgetfulness as a feature. Persistent memory and embeddings are solved problems. Knowing what and when to forget is harder. People relocate, travel, get injured, heal, get injured again. Coach an athlete off a hill route in a city they left last year, or keep managing an injury that healed six months ago, and they stop believing you know them.

1. Submit examples of your public work, professional or personal
2. 15-minute call: what Imperfect is, how this process works, and whether it's worth each other's time
3. Remote content creation challenge
4. 45-minute call about you and what you've done, and your questions about Imperfect
5. In person interview in San Francisco while on a run
6. References
7. Offer

Apply through this posting: it's the one queue we read and answer.