Chief of Staff

Collinear AI • San Francisco, CA

4d

About The Position

Collinear is a data research lab that builds simulated worlds to train and evaluate AI agents. It partners with frontier labs to create custom reinforcement-learning environments, tasks, and graders for coding, knowledge work, and science, and develops frontier evaluations including CWE-bench, MatFlowBench, and FrontierCUA.

The Chief of Staff partners with the CEO to turn the company’s highest-priority goals into decisions, coordinated execution, and measurable results. The role spans strategy and hands-on delivery, including assessing market opportunities, improving customer-project delivery, and preparing investor conversations. The person in this role will build an understanding of Collinear’s technology, customers, and economics to challenge assumptions and make sound trade-offs.

The Chief of Staff will work with the CEO and functional leaders to set priorities, lead cross-functional projects, establish the company’s operating cadence, inform strategic decisions, and prepare decision, investor, board, and internal communications. The role also involves building and evaluating AI-assisted workflows and identifying organizational improvements that help the company scale.

Success in the first 90 days includes understanding the customers, product, delivery process, and business priorities; establishing a lightweight planning and review cadence; delivering a meaningful cross-functional project; improving a recurring workflow with AI and measurable benefit; and helping the CEO and team clarify priorities and make decisions faster.

Requirements

• A track record of taking difficult, loosely defined projects through to measurable results in a fast-moving environment.
• Strong analytical judgment, including the ability to work with data, understand business economics, test assumptions, and explain conclusions clearly.
• Technical curiosity and fluency sufficient to learn how AI training, evaluations, and agent workflows work and collaborate credibly with researchers and engineers; an ML researcher background is not required.
• Excellent writing and communication skills, including the ability to distill complex information, surface disagreement constructively, and help teams reach decisions.
• Initiative, discretion, and dependable follow-through, including thoughtful handling of sensitive information and the ability to influence across teams through trust and sound judgment.
• Practical experience using AI tools to improve work, including checking outputs and understanding their limitations.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with AI infrastructure, enterprise customers, data operations, or a technical founder-led company.
• Relevant experience in startup operations, product, business operations, consulting with execution experience, or building a company.

Responsibilities

• Work with the CEO and functional leaders to define high-impact goals, assign owners, resolve dependencies, and follow through on commitments.
• Lead critical projects end to end across research, engineering, customer delivery, and go-to-market, defining success and establishing repeatable processes where useful.
• Run focused planning and leadership reviews, maintain a useful view of company metrics, and clarify decisions and accountability.
• Assess opportunities, pricing, partnerships, and resource allocation using customer conversations, market research, and quantitative analysis; write recommendations that make trade-offs explicit.
• Prepare decision briefs, investor and board materials, and internal communications for the CEO.
• Help ensure important customer, partner, and investor conversations lead to concrete next steps.
• Build and improve AI-assisted workflows for research, reporting, and operations; evaluate their accuracy and usefulness and retain human judgment where it matters.
• Identify and address organizational gaps in hiring, onboarding, information sharing, and collaboration that constrain team progress.

Benefits

• Broad responsibility and direct partnership with the CEO.
• Opportunity to work close to the frontier of AI capability development and help shape how a technical company grows.
• Opportunity to build systems and lead initiatives with visible impact.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed