The Opportunity
We’re hiring A-players from private equity and investing backgrounds to help design, deploy, and scale it. Incentive engineering, or incentineering, is the practice of designing, deploying, and optimizing performance-based incentive systems for a workforce. It sits where industrial engineering, organizational psychology, and financial engineering meet, and it lets a company run its people like an investment instead of a year-end guess.
This is a rare opportunity to join a high-trajectory tech company at the ground floor. Historically, startups do not hire finance talent until much later stages – at which point the upside is significantly lower.
The Role
We're looking for 2-3 years of investment banking and or private equity experience at top-tier firms. Startup experience is a plus, not a requirement. Our current Incentive Engineers are all ex-PE associates from top funds.
This role involves acting as an embedded partner to the C-suite at customer organizations, working directly with leadership to diagnose incentive misalignment and design systems that drive productivity, retention, and operational excellence.
You will become a critical business partner to executives across a portfolio of companies and help them model tradeoffs and unit economics, then iterate the campaigns based on real-world behavior.
This is a highly strategic role that will leverage your P&L fluency while allowing you to work side by side with world class executives and learn from them.
Why the Role Beats Staying in High Finance
Compensation & Upside (The Carry Reality). A common concern is: “I’ll make more staying in PE because of carry.” In reality, carry is far less certain than it appears because:
**Upward Mobility. **In PE, progression is constrained by fund math and fixed partner slots. At Jolly, ownership scales with impact, and advancement is not bottlenecked by title scarcity. As the company grows, new senior leadership roles are created organically, providing meaningful opportunities to accelerate your career.
**Responsibility & Learning Velocity. **Instead of supporting deals you don’t own or optimizing for internal politics, you will own outcomes, work directly with customers, and see your decisions play out immediately.
**Job Security in an AI World. **Junior PE work is increasingly automated, while this role is client-facing, judgment-driven, and relationship-based – among the least likely roles to be displaced by AI.