Chief of Staff, Operations

Photon•New York, NY

3d•$170,000 - $200,000•Onsite

About The Position

Photon gives patients ownership of prescriptions. We’re building the infrastructure that connects prescribing to fulfillment, giving patients a simpler way to understand their options and choose where and how to get their medications. Our vision is to make prescriptions more transparent, accessible, and consumer-driven. This role is for someone who can be thrown at almost anything and figure out how to make it work. One month that might mean rebuilding how the company hires and onboards people, the next it might be automating a reporting process no one's had time to fix, the next it's diving into a data problem that's been ignored. You don't need a fixed lane — you build one wherever the company needs it most right now. You think in systems, not job descriptions. People process, internal tooling, budgeting, onboarding — to you these are all just systems that either work or don't, and you're the person who makes them work. You'd rather build a script, a workflow, or an AI-assisted tool than hire your way out of a manual process. You're allergic to busywork, especially your own — if something's repeatable, you make it repeatable by a system, not by you doing it again next month. Your job is to spin the web: build the system, get it working cleanly, hand it off or automate it, then move to the next thread that needs attention. You're not looking to permanently own one function — you're looking to be the person who makes everything work, everywhere, and then moves on to what's next. That requires real resourcefulness: you don't wait to be told how, you figure it out. You can hold a lot of context across the entire company in your head at once — priorities, people, half-finished projects, upcoming deadlines — without losing the thread or spiraling off chasing the wrong thing. You know the difference between "interesting" and "important right now," and you protect your attention accordingly.

Requirements

4-6+ years in a high-ownership, high-breadth operational role (chief of staff, business operations, startup operations generalist) with a track record of context-switching across genuinely different problem types
Demonstrated ability to build structure and process from ambiguity, across more than one functional area
Experience at an early-stage (Series A/B) startup, where process didn't exist yet and you had to build it
Real, hands-on tooling/automation fluency — comfortable using scripting, no-code, or AI-assisted platforms to eliminate manual work rather than absorb it
Strong written and verbal communication — comfortable synthesizing information for an executive audience
Proven follow-through and resourcefulness: things you own get finished, without needing a playbook handed to you
Excited to work in-office in Brooklyn

Nice To Haves

Experience building internal tools yourself — scripting, automation, or AI-assisted platforms
Background in healthcare or health-tech
Comfort with data — light analysis, spreadsheets, or dashboards to inform decisions

Responsibilities

Act as a highly flexible execution partner to the COO — take on whatever the company's highest-priority gap is at any given moment, from strategic projects to hands-on process work
Own the systems behind how Photon finds, hires, onboards, and supports its people — treating this as an operations and tooling problem, not an HR administration one
Own the company's internal tool stack and AI-assisted workflows — deciding what tools exist, what gets automated, and what gets built, bought, or retired, across people processes and beyond
Build and improve operational systems across functions — get each one running cleanly and efficiently, then move on to the next area that needs it, rather than settling into permanent ownership of any one system
Hold context across the full company — priorities, projects in flight, and cross-team dependencies — so you can flag risks and connect dots before they become problems
Drive execution on the COO’s top initiatives, from strategic projects to closing operational gaps that don't have a natural owner