Chief of Staff

Location: San Francisco, CACompany Stage of Funding: Early-Stage / SeedOffice Type: On-site (5 days/week in San Francisco)Salary: $150,000 – $250,000Equity: Competitive equityVisa: No visa sponsorship; U.S. citizens and Green Card holders only

About the Company

Our client is an early-stage AI safety and cybersecurity research company focused on building tools that help organizations understand, secure, and monitor increasingly capable AI systems.

The company provides a comprehensive suite of AI safety and security capabilities, including runtime guardrails, red-teaming frameworks, interpretability techniques, observability, and tools designed to systematically identify model failure modes and improve AI system robustness.

The company is building at the intersection of AI safety, cybersecurity, and emerging AI infrastructure, with a particular focus on the security risks created as coding agents gain access to repositories, terminals, MCP servers, internal tools, and production environments.

Its technology helps organizations understand how AI agents interact with their systems, enforce security controls around sensitive actions and tools, and continuously monitor for risky behavior such as secret leakage, insecure tool usage, unintended code modifications, and data exfiltration.

Founded in 2024, the company is an extremely lean team of approximately five employees and has raised $10M in funding from leading investors including Menlo Ventures and Altos.

This is an opportunity to join an exceptionally early-stage company where the Chief of Staff will work directly with the founders and have broad ownership across operations, strategy, customer engagement, compliance, business development, and company-building.

What You'll Do

• Work directly with the founders to unblock the team and accelerate company priorities
• Manage customer communications and relationships on behalf of the founders
• Support contract negotiations and coordinate with legal partners
• Drive compliance initiatives such as SOC 2 and ensure evidence, documentation, and processes remain on track
• Conduct market research across AI safety, cybersecurity, AI agents, and adjacent markets
• Write strategic documents, internal memos, analyses, and company materials
• Support sales outreach and help develop relationships with prospective customers and partners
• Represent the company at conferences, industry events, and external meetings
• Coordinate with external partners and stakeholders
• Identify operational bottlenecks before they become problems
• Proactively solve problems across operations, finance, business development, and company strategy
• Work across multiple functions rather than operating within a narrowly defined role
• Take ambiguous founder-level priorities and turn them into concrete actions
• Build processes and systems as the company scales
• Support strategic initiatives from initial research through execution
• Maintain visibility into high-priority company projects and ensure follow-through
• Become a trusted extension of the founders across internal and external initiatives
• Operate with a high degree of urgency in a rapidly evolving AI and cybersecurity environment

Ideal Candidate Background

Experience Requirements

• 1–3 years of experience in consulting, finance, startup operations, or another highly analytical and execution-oriented environment
• Experience at a top-tier consulting firm, with MBB experience strongly preferred
• Experience working in high-growth or early-stage startup environments is highly valued
• Demonstrated ability to take ownership of projects from ambiguous beginnings through execution
• Experience working directly with senior executives, founders, or leadership teams is strongly preferred
• Comfortable operating across multiple business functions rather than within a narrowly defined role
• Experience with strategic analysis, business operations, market research, or special projects

Technical & Analytical Requirements

• Strong analytical and problem-solving ability
• Excellent written communication and ability to produce clear strategic documents
• Strong research and synthesis skills
• Ability to quickly understand complex technical and business concepts
• Strong proficiency with common productivity, research, and analytical tools
• Ability to organize large amounts of information and turn it into actionable recommendations
• Comfortable working with data, financial information, market research, and operational metrics
• Ability to manage multiple high-priority workstreams simultaneously

Education

• Bachelor's degree from a top-tier university
• Strong academic performance preferred
• Consulting, finance, economics, business, engineering, computer science, or similarly analytical backgrounds are highly relevant

Soft Skills

• Extremely high agency and self-direction
• Proactive problem solver who does not wait for instructions
• Exceptional attention to detail
• Highly organized and disciplined
• Excellent English communication skills, both written and verbal
• Comfortable working directly with founders
• Strong executive presence and professionalism
• Comfortable with ambiguity and incomplete information
• Fast learner with strong intellectual curiosity
• Willing to take on work outside of a traditional job description
• Strong judgment and ability to prioritize
• High urgency and strong execution orientation
• Low-ego, collaborative working style
• Comfortable operating in a very small team where everyone owns critical responsibilities

Compensation & Benefits

• Base salary: $150,000 – $250,000
• Competitive equity package
• Direct exposure to founders and company leadership
• Opportunity to own strategic and operational initiatives from day one
• Broad exposure across strategy, operations, finance, sales, legal, and business development
• Opportunity to work at the intersection of AI safety and cybersecurity
• Extremely high ownership and autonomy
• Fast-moving early-stage environment
• Opportunity to help build company infrastructure and processes from the ground up
• Direct exposure to customers, investors, partners, and industry leaders

Why Join

This is an opportunity to join an exceptionally early-stage AI safety and cybersecurity company at a critical moment in the development of increasingly capable AI systems.

You’ll work directly with the founders and operate across virtually every part of the business — from customer relationships and sales to compliance, market research, strategy, finance, and operations.

Because the team is extremely lean, this is not a traditional Chief of Staff role where responsibilities are narrowly defined. You’ll be expected to identify what needs to happen, figure out how to make it happen, and execute with minimal direction.

If you are an exceptionally high-agency operator who enjoys solving ambiguous problems, working directly with founders, moving quickly, and taking ownership across the business, this role offers unusually broad scope and career acceleration.