CEO Decision Intelligence Lead — Industrial SMEs

TL;DR

Also known as Forward Development Engineer · Implementation Consultant · Delivery Analyst

LocationParis (IDF) — on-site preferred, hybrid possible

Salary €60–80K gross/year + BSPCE equity

Contract CDI — Cadre

Reports to Jean-Baptiste, CEO & Co-founder

Start Q2 2026 — as soon as possible

Who We Are

Vela is building the operating layer that industrial CEOs have always needed and never had — a system that doesn't just show what happened, but tells you what to do next, while there is still time to act.

Our mission: help industrial leaders make high-stakes decisions that repeatedly translate into margin-point gains and freed-up cash — by building the causal model of their business and governing every decision before variance becomes financial loss.

Vela was founded inside OSS Ventures by Jean-Baptiste (CEO, background in VC and B2B SaaS) and his co-founder CTO. We started by doing the work manually — sitting with CEOs every week, building their causal models by hand, running the operating reviews. It works. We are now building the product that automates what we have been doing by hand. Today, Vela is in active deployment with three design partners across logistics, transport, and manufacturing.

Our values: Causal thinking over correlation · Delivery over presentation · Depth as a differentiator · Velocity with judgment.

Why We Need You

In one sentence: you are the person who makes Vela real for each client.

You take a CEO's messy operational reality — fragmented data, intuitive processes, informal decision habits — and transform it into a structured, live, causal cockpit inside the Vela platform. You run the weekly operating review. You explain the variances. You help the executive team commit to the right action. You are part management consultant, part data engineer, part product expert — and you never need a slide deck to deliver value.

Your mandate in three dimensions:

* Build — Model each client's business causality inside Vela: drivers, sub-drivers, formulas, alerts, scenarios.

* Run — Facilitate the weekly exec review, turning signals into decisions and decisions into committed actions with owners and deadlines.

* Improve — Identify and close data blindspots and model weaknesses, and feed every insight back into product development.

Day to day: on Mondays, you prepare the operating brief for each client. Tuesday through Thursday, you are in client environments — on-site or remote — building driver formulas, structuring causal trees, validating alert thresholds, and facilitating exec reviews. On Fridays, you update the cockpit and document what you have learned.

Who You'll Work With

Directly with Jean-Baptiste (CEO) and the CTO co-founder. Across the table every week: CEOs, CFOs, and COOs running €10–500M businesses under PE pressure, with real operational complexity and real consequences for bad decisions. You will not be managed from a distance. You are expected to show up as a peer — not an assistant.

What's Next in Your Career Path?

This is not a support role. It is a founding role in a category-defining company. Within 12 months: Lead FDE, owning a client portfolio independently. Within 24 months: Head of Delivery, shaping the methodology and team. Beyond that: one of the best training grounds in Europe for founding your own venture or joining a portfolio company as a founding operator.

Your Profile

Mandatory required skills

* 3+ years in a data-intensive analytical or consulting role — strategy consulting, FP&A, operational excellence, business performance analysis. You structure ambiguous problems and deliver recommendations to senior executives under pressure.

* 2+ years working directly with operational or financial data — ERP exports, SQL, Excel. You can build a driver calculation without a data engineer at your side.

* 1+ year in a client-facing role with C-level stakeholders. You have been in the room with a CEO or CFO and held your own. Client management is something you are refining — not learning.

What we will build together Vela causal modeling methodology · Industrial operations literacy · Product mastery and AI agent configuration · Change management in industrial contexts.

This Is Not the Right Role If…

* You are not location-flexible — client travel across France and neighboring countries is part of the job.

* You need a fully defined role, a large team, and established processes to perform confidently.

* You are not looking for a positively challenging job — we expect senior consultant-level performance from week one.

* You are not fully fluent in both French and English — not "good enough to get by," but strong enough to run a tense exec review in French and write sharp product specs in English on the same day.

* You prefer to deliver analysis rather than drive decisions — our job ends when a decision is committed and owned, not when the slide is finished.

Expected Behaviors

* Show up prepared with a point of view, not just a summary.

* Write decisions, not meeting notes — with an owner and a deadline, in the platform.

* Surface problems immediately — unreliable data, a drifting client, a broken formula.

* Document everything you learn. You are building the company's knowledge base.

* Operate with low ego. Trust is earned through rigor and the ability to be corrected without losing composure.

What Success Looks Like

Day 30 — First causal model built independently. You can explain the Vela framework to a new client without support.

Day 90 — 3 to 5 client reviews run per week autonomously. 2 major data blindspots closed. 1 product insight that changed how the founding team thinks about the platform.

Day 180 — You are the operational backbone of Vela's client delivery. Clients trust your analysis and commit to your recommendations. You are training AI agents on your causal templates and beginning to mentor a junior hire.

Interview Process

Step 1 — Screening call (30 min) with Jean-Baptiste: background, mutual fit, first 90 days.

Step 2 — Technical case study (2–3h, take-home): synthetic dataset from a fictional industrial client. Identify the key performance drivers, build a simplified causal tree, write three actionable insights formatted as you would enter them into the Vela cockpit.

Step 3 — Case debrief + team meeting (90 min, on-site): 30 min presenting your case study, 30 min with the CTO on the data and technical side, 30 min with Jean-Baptiste on a real client scenario.

Step 4 — References + offer (1 week): two professional references; offer within five business days of the final interview.

Final Words

In-office or remote? We believe the best work happens in proximity in the early days. Minimum three days per week in the office for the first three months, then we adapt based on operational autonomy.

Work & Life Balance. We don't believe in burnout as a business model. We do believe in high intensity during high-stakes moments and genuine recovery around them. We commit to being explicit about when we are asking a lot — we expect the same from you.

We welcome ALL candidates. We evaluate on quality of thinking, rigor of work, and strength of character. We particularly encourage applications from women and underrepresented candidates in the French tech and industrial ecosystem.