Field Operations and Customer Success Associate

About the role We are looking for a vocational training graduate or university graduate who is eager to wear many hats in our start-up and support operational activities: rolling up sleeves during field work itself, supporting customers, independently driving our customer projects, ensuring timely delivery, and managing our sensor inventory in the lab and in the field. This is primarily an operational role, however, we are looking for someone with a technical background. It is explicitly not an engineering role. Your tasks Field Work • You take full responsibility for field work: from scheduling a field visit to customers (usually somewhere along a river in the Alps), to renting and loading the car with sensors and safety equipment, selecting the optimal installation site, updating firmware and sensor settings, checking if the sensor is sending data correctly via LoRa or satellite, to installing the sensor in the river including additional material for its protection and taking water samples. • You identify weaknesses in our sensor deployment setup, develop better solutions, and communicate these to the product team. • You develop better and more robust setups for sensor installation as needed. • You keep the collected samples and the field equipment neatly organized. Customer Success • You stay in contact with customers and ensure that our product works as it should. • You resolve any problems that customers have with the sensors. • You document occurring problems and communicate them to the product and engineering team. • You document customer feature requests and pass them on to the product team. Project Management • You maintain an overview of our ongoing customer projects (contact persons, next steps, assignment of installed sensors, which sensors are online and/or need to be repaired). • You are the driving force ensuring we deliver results to customers by: requesting new features from the software team, informing customers when the feature is ready, and subsequently ensuring it is actually delivered; requesting bug fixes from the engineering team, providing customers with a date for the fix, and subsequently ensuring that the problem is actually solved. Inventory Management • You create and maintain our sensor inventory in the lab and in the field. • You know how many sensors we need to order from our manufacturing partner – based on the number of customers in our pipeline. • You place sensor orders with our manufacturing partner in good time so that the sensors arrive before the project begins. • You ensure a smooth ordering process with the manufacturing partner. • You take over basic budget management, expense reporting, and tracking the invoices of our manufacturing partners. • You take care of the daily logistical processes. This is you • You enjoy working outdoors in the field – in any weather. • You enjoy talking to customers and helping them succeed. • You learn quickly. • You are extremely well organized, reliable, and enjoy bringing order to chaos. • You are a strong communicator and a natural talent at multitasking. • You like to take initiative and ask for help when needed. • You feel comfortable in a young, rapidly changing environment. • You can swim. Requirements • You speak German and English (Level C or native speaker); candidates who also speak fluent French are preferred. • You possess a valid driver's license, drive manual transmission cars safely, and are confident driving on mountain roads to reach field locations. • You have a degree in a technical field (engineering, natural sciences, or similar) from vocational training, university, or university of applied sciences (or equivalent). • You have no hesitation about operating a drill while standing in the middle of a river. • You are proficient in using Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint, Excel). • You are familiar with using productivity tools (Google Workspace, Slack, Notion, etc.). Advantageous • Certificate as Swiftwater Rescue Technician • Experience with IoT or sensor-based systems • Experience in hiking through rivers • Previous start-up experience Framework data • Workload: 100 % FTE. • Compensation: competitive base salary plus substantial equity, depending on experience. • Development: This role offers the chance to grow into a key operational position along with the company. • Reporting line: You report directly to the founders. • Location: Zürich, with approximately 25 % travel (one day flexible/remote). • Start date: Candidates who can start by 1 September or earlier are preferred. The position must be filled by 1 October 2026 at the latest. • Work permit: Swiss nationals and EU citizens with a work permit are preferred, as we cannot sponsor work permits for candidates from third countries. • Relocation: We do not cover relocation costs. • Benefits: 25 vacation days as well as pension fund contributions. About Riverkin We are a well-funded start-up building real-time sensor and data infrastructure for rivers. Our own sensors, installed in the field, capture live water level and sediment data, while our platform transforms this data into decision-ready insights for our customers. We work on two central use cases: hydropower, where better sediment data helps during flushing, the protection of plants, and compliance with regulations; and flash flood risks, where local river data hydropow...