Chief of Staff, North America

Zen Educate•Chicago, IL

10h•Hybrid

About The Position

Zen's mission is to fully staff classrooms, so all children can thrive and educators avoid burnout. We do this by combining a product that schools and educators love with a hard-working, education-obsessed team. Since launching in North America, we’ve been growing 4x year over year. That kind of growth creates hard, complex, urgent problems across the business. We’re now looking for a Chief of Staff, North America to work closely with our leadership team as we scale. This is a role for someone energized by these challenges. Someone who can move quickly, create clarity from ambiguity, and turn rapid growth into better systems, sharper decisions, and stronger execution. The right person will be able to operate at both altitude and ground level, shaping strategy, doing sharp analysis, and getting deep into frontline processes when that is what the business needs. Zen is now a 500+ person team operating across the UK, US, and Canada. We’re venture backed, well funded, and building toward a national rollout across North America. We’re also a certified B Corporation, which matters to us. It reflects the company we are trying to build: one that grows quickly, performs exceptionally, and stays deeply accountable to schools, educators, children, and the communities we serve. We’re trying to do really well by doing good. We’re scaling fast, and the work is outrunning the org chart. You’ll work directly with the North American leadership team, owning the operating cadence, driving key cross-functional projects, and jumping on problems that do not yet have a clear owner. It is a broad remit by design. The business needs someone who can move fast across functions, bring structure to ambiguity, and make important work happen. You’ll report to Chris Berry, Managing Director, North America, who made a similar move from consulting into startup revenue and operations. That means you’ll get close coaching from someone who understands the transition and will push you to grow quickly.

Requirements

Demonstrated record of exceptional performance
5 to 10 years of experience, including time in consulting, investing, high-growth startups, strategy, operations, revenue, marketplaces, or another demanding generalist environment
Ability to take on hard problems, create clarity and momentum, and drive real outcomes
Relentless drive to deliver outcomes
Endless curiosity
Strong analytical judgment
Clear, logical, compelling communication
High ownership
Low ego
Comfort with ambiguity
Ability to influence senior stakeholders
Excitement to move between strategy and hands-on execution
Genuine care for the mission, not just the title

Nice To Haves

You do not need to have been a Chief of Staff before

Responsibilities

Partnering with leadership to refine strategy and priorities
Driving projects across Growth, Operations, Customer Success, Finance, and People
Supporting new market launches and commercial rollout plans
Building the operating cadence, dashboards, and decision-making systems we need to scale
Turning ambiguous problems into clear plans, owners, and outcomes
Jumping into urgent business problems when there is no obvious owner yet