Functional Expert – Zürich.

01The firm

A senior firm, sized like a startup.

Convolving is a Swiss-based AI services firm running fixed-fee sprints for clients across five regulated industries. Delivery is partner-led on every engagement, and the team has shipped 30+ engagements to date. We pair tenured functional operators with AI-native engineers and a Technical Program Manager on every sprint, so the redesign lands in production rather than in a slide deck.

Engagements run 3 to 12 weeks at a flat fee. No retainer creep, no timesheet tracking, no change orders. When the artifact is shipped and adopted, the engagement closes. The hiring bar is senior across the firm: we do not build pyramids and we do not staff with juniors.

02The role

The senior person in the room.

This is the seat for someone who has done the work, not advised on it. We hire Functional Experts out of 15 to 25 years inside a single function such as finance, operations, risk, procurement, legal, clinical practice, or HR. The hire is normally moving out of a head-of-function or operating-partner role into a portfolio of redesign engagements.

Your seat sits across the table from the client’s senior operators. You translate between their language and what the AI Process Engineer is building, defend the controls and exceptions that matter, and own the trade-off conversation when the model proposes something the function cannot live with. The Partner running the engagement leans on you for institutional credibility with the client’s line leadership.

First 90 days: shadow two live sprints, lead the discovery phase on a third, and start to specialise the redesign templates against your function. By month six you are the named Functional Expert on three to four parallel engagements.

03What you’ll do

The work, week to week.

• Lead discovery interviews with the client’s line operators, exception handlers, and function head, and put the current process on paper before any model is wired up.
• Score candidate workflows against business impact, data readiness, change-management cost, and risk perimeter, and defend the ranked list in front of the client’s executive sponsor.
• Sit beside the AI Process Engineer through the build and call out where the redesign breaks a control, a regulator-facing report, or a judgement call that has to stay human.
• Own the senior-operator conversation: explain the trade-offs the model is making, where the redesign creates new risk, and what the client needs to track post-launch.
• Train the client’s function leadership on what changes in their week-to-week workflow once the artifact ships, including new exception paths and escalation rules.
• Feed every engagement back into the firm’s reference library so the next Functional Expert in the same domain starts a week ahead of where you started.

04What we’re looking for

The shape of the hire.

• 15+ years inside a single function (finance, operations, risk, procurement, legal, clinical, or HR), at least five of them at head-of-function, operating-partner, or senior-director level.
• Visible track record of redesigning a core workflow inside one operating environment, with the controls and audit trail to back it up.
• Comfort sitting across the table from a CFO, COO, General Counsel, or equivalent function head, and pushing back when the redesign is wrong for their controls posture.
• Working fluency with at least one major AI assistant in your own week (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini). You don’t need to ship code, but you need to be able to read the artifact.
• Demonstrated bias for written work product: discovery memos, exception logs, runbooks. We publish a lot of internal writing.
• Plainspoken, senior, allergic to consulting jargon and conference-deck rhetoric.
• Swiss work permit or EU/EFTA citizenship. Based in our Oberrieden, ZH office; one or two days remote per week.

05Nice to have

Useful, not required.

• Prior in-house experience at a Big 4 or MBB firm before going operational, so you can speak both languages without translating.
• A regulator-facing reputation (SEC, FCA, FINMA, MHRA, FDA, or similar) you can quietly trade on with a client’s compliance team.
• Reading knowledge of a second European language (German, French, Italian) for Swiss and pan-European engagements.
• A point of view on agentic systems in your function that you have written down somewhere, even informally.
• Prior board observer or operating advisor role at a private-equity portfolio company.

06What you’ll get

The package, plainly.

Comp. We pay senior market rates for the hub. Compensation is calibrated to Zürich market, not Swiss-discounted. Convolving GmbH on payroll. Base plus a sprint-completion bonus tied to adoption, not utilisation.

Sprint model. Engagements are fixed-fee, 3 to 12 weeks. No retainer creep. No timesheet tracking. You finish a sprint, you take a week before the next one starts.

Training budget. Annual CHF 5,000 for conferences, courses, or paid research time on a question that matters to your function or to the firm.

The work itself. One engagement at a time, with the room to push back on the design and own the artifact end-to-end.

07How to apply

One short note. No long form.

Send a CV and a short note (3 to 5 sentences) on a workflow you have personally seen broken at a previous employer. Tell us what the controls were, where judgement entered the work, and what a redesign would have had to honour. We read every note.