Chief of Staff

OpenFX•New York, NY

16d•Hybrid

About The Position

OpenFX is a rapidly growing company in the financial technology sector, aiming to revolutionize cross-border payments. The company is scaling significantly in terms of headcount and transaction volume. This role is crucial for ensuring reliable execution of the company's strategy by managing internal operations, executive processes, planning, prioritization, and decision-making integrity. The position requires a blend of operational leadership and technical depth, particularly in product and engineering, to manage constrained engineering capacity and enforce prioritization discipline.

Requirements

Experience operating within a company that grew through hypergrowth at Series C+.
Firsthand knowledge of common breaking points during hypergrowth.
Track record of holding senior people accountable without positional authority while preserving relationships.
Evidence of designing a mechanism from a blank page and driving adoption against resistance.
Willingness to manage up, including telling a CEO or boss they are the problem and maintaining the working relationship.
Deep product and engineering fluency, with experience running or closely operating with product or engineering organizations.
Ability to hold Product, Design, and Engineering to a prioritization discipline and pressure-test capacity estimates.
Experience through at least two scaling reorganizations, with specific accounts of what broke, what was foreseen, and what was missed.
Judgment to separate signal from noise.
Discipline to bring a limited number of prioritized items (e.g., three) rather than many.
Written clarity sufficient for consequential internal documents and company-wide communication.
High tolerance for ambiguity.
Short-run tolerance for being disliked.
Speed of operation where a week is a meaningful unit of time.
Daily working fluency with AI tools and the instinct to build reusable workflows.
Ambition to run a business unit; this role is designed as a 24-month position to prepare for such a move.

Nice To Haves

Cross-border payments, FX, or stablecoin infrastructure background.
Multi-geography operating experience.
Prior Chief of Staff, BizOps, Product Ops, or Strategy and Operations experience at a high-growth company.

Responsibilities

Own the executive operating system end to end, including leadership syncs, strategic deep-dives, executive offsites, and bi-annual planning cycles.
Maintain the single source of truth for leadership commitments and directly address overdue items.
Detect and facilitate early resolution of cross-functional misalignment between leaders.
Enforce a single prioritization discipline across all functions, driving company-wide capacity allocation and roadmap forums.
Ensure explicit, timely, and well-documented prioritization decisions, including clear records of tradeoffs and declined items.
Interrogate capacity estimates and timelines, using technical depth to identify potential issues before they become commitments.
Own the architecture for company planning and review cycles, including quarterly planning and OKR integrity.
Manage the signal the CEO receives through a synthesized weekly report covering key business areas, and oversee monthly and quarterly post-mortems.
Actively seek unfiltered information by engaging with employees at all levels and through informal channels.
Bring prioritized issues (top three) with proposed solutions and hypotheses, rather than problems alone.
Develop the internal narrative and company-wide communications, including AMAs, planning content, and strategic direction.
Anticipate and address organizational breaking points during scaling, identifying structural risks and building contingency plans.
Deliver outcomes by navigating the organization cross-functionally, executing delegated tasks, and ensuring clear communication.
Return work to its rightful owners, ensuring accountability rests with the responsible function.
Maintain and manage an 'unsolved problems register' of persistent issues, including root cause analysis and recommendations for resolution.
Build, operate, and transfer playbooks for key internal processes like performance reviews, onboarding, and interview training.
Manage the CEO's time as a portfolio, auditing actual allocation against intent and identifying areas for improvement.
Act as a trusted advisor to the CEO and leadership team, providing operational and management insights, including unsolicited advice.
Communicate critical feedback to the CEO regarding work delegation, decision staging, and slow-walked people calls.