Head of Operations & Chief of Staff @ AI Commerce Infrastructure Startup

Head Of Operations & Chief Of Staff

Our client is building agentic commerce infrastructure for marketers: the layer through which demand will flow into sales and products across industries as the age of agents unfolds. Right now, that means agents a marketer can deploy to capture leads directly from other agents.

The team is six engineers. The CEO is currently acting as CEO, CFO, head of marketing, head of sales, people manager, and office admin, all at once. They are hiring a Head of Operations & Chief of Staff to take ownership of everything that isn't building product and closing customers, so the CEO can focus entirely on reaching product-market fit.

This role is equal parts Chief of Staff and Head of Operations. The hire will be an extension of the CEO acting with their authority, protecting their time, and making things happen across every function.

This is the first non-engineering hire and the most important one they will make this year. The right person will grow with the company and eventually help hire and build out the teams that come next.

Key Responsibilities:

• Operations & Finance
• Full ownership of day-to-day financial operations: bookkeeping, bill pay, expense tracking, vendor management, and payroll logistics. Coordination with external accountants, tax preparers, and legal counsel. You will own company operations end-to-end and ensure the CEO's professional time is protected and maximized. Nothing is beneath you.
• People, Team & Management
• This team is talented, technical, and doing a startup for the first time. They need structure, accountability, and someone who creates both without being asked. You will establish and run team cadences: standups, weekly syncs, retrospectives. You make sure they actually happen and actually matter. You'll be the person engineers go to for non-technical blockers. You'll track deliverables, follow up when things slip, and hold the team to commitments. Technical decisions belong to technical leadership. You own the operational cadence, accountability, and follow-through that ensures those decisions translate into results.
• You won't wait for the CEO to tell you something isn't working. You'll see it and address it. You'll also own hiring logistics end-to-end when we bring on new people: job postings, candidate coordination, scheduling, and follow-through. Over time, this role grows into genuine people leadership. The goal is a team that runs with more autonomy and less CEO involvement, and you're the person who makes that possible
• CEO Support & Sales Coordination
• Full ownership of the CEO's calendar, communications triage, and time protection. You are the professional front door to the company. You screen inbound, route communications, and schedule external meetings on the CEO's behalf. You prepare the CEO for every important meeting: context, agenda, background on who they're meeting. You own the logistics of the sales process: scheduling calls, managing follow-ups, making sure prospects don't go cold while the CEO is heads-down. The CEO is the one selling; you make sure nothing around that process ever fails.
• You track every commitment, follow-up, and deadline across every function. Nothing falls through the cracks because you don't let it.
• Marketing & PR Execution
• The CEO owns marketing strategy and customer-facing messaging. Your job is to make sure that strategy actually gets executed. That means managing the content pipeline: coordinating blog posts, thought leadership, and social media, using AI tools and external contractors, with the CEO setting direction and approving output. You hire and manage freelancers and PR firms, hold them accountable for results, and make sure nothing stalls because of a logistics or coordination gap. You own outbound campaign execution and follow-ups, event logistics, and press coordination. When the CEO needs a placement or a speaking slot, you're the one making the calls and managing the process end-to-end.
• Special Projects
• At any given time there will be one or two high-priority projects that are urgent, cross-functional, and don't fit neatly anywhere else: legal, compliance, visa and immigration processes for employees, external partnerships, whatever the moment demands. This includes coordinating with legal counsel, building evidence files, sourcing supporting opportunities, and owning these processes end-to-end. You get your hands dirty. You figure it out. You don't come back with reasons it's complicated. You come back with progress.

Qualifications:

• You've done this before.
• You have 510 years of experience, with significant time at early-stage startups or equivalently demanding environments. You might have been a Head of Ops, Chief of Staff, Senior EA to a founder, or an early employee who became the ops person because someone had to. You've seen enough to know what good looks like, and to build it from scratch when it isn't there.
• You execute.
• You don't wait for instructions. You see what needs to happen and you make it happen. Advising is easy. You do the work.
• You carry authority and you use it.
• People don't leave you waiting. When you set a deadline, it gets met, because you're demanding and people know it. When you run a process, nobody half-asses their part. You hold people to a high standard, including yourself, and that's not something you apologize for.
• You get your hands dirty.
• The scope of this role is wide and sometimes unglamorous. One hour you're coordinating with outside counsel. The next you're chasing down an unpaid bill. You distinguish between what needs to happen and what doesn't. Everything else is just work.
• You are completely trustworthy.
• You will know things about this company (financially, legally, strategically, personally) that almost nobody else knows. You treat that as a serious responsibility. Discretion isn't a policy you follow; it's who you are.
• You're an exceptional communicator.
• You'll be writing emails on behalf of the CEO, talking to lawyers, journalists, candidates, and investors. You're sharp, professional, and you can match the CEO's voice when needed.
• You think in AI tools.
• We use AI extensively for writing, outreach, design, and development. You reach for these tools automatically, you're always finding new ways to do more with them, and you move faster because of it

What They Offer:

• $150K$250K base salary plus meaningful equity