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, partnering with frontier labs to develop custom reinforcement-learning environments, tasks, and graders for coding, knowledge work, and science. The company also works on frontier evaluations, including CWE-bench, MatFlowBench, and FrontierCUA.

The Chief of Staff partners with the CEO to turn the company’s most important priorities into decisions, coordinated execution, and measurable results. The role moves between strategy and hands-on execution, taking ownership of unclear or cross-functional problems and building understanding of the company’s technology, customers, and economics to support sound decisions.

The Chief of Staff will work with the CEO and functional leaders to define company goals, manage critical projects, establish an operating cadence, analyze strategic opportunities, prepare decision and investor materials, improve AI-assisted workflows, and address organizational needs that constrain progress. Success in the first 90 days includes understanding the business and its operational bottlenecks, establishing a lightweight planning and review cadence, delivering a meaningful cross-functional project, improving a recurring workflow with AI, and helping the CEO and team make faster decisions and focus on high-impact work.

The role offers close exposure to AI capability development, broad responsibility, direct partnership with the CEO, and the opportunity to build systems and lead initiatives with visible impact.

Requirements

• Track record of taking difficult, loosely defined projects through to measurable results in a fast-moving environment.
• Strong analytical judgment, including ability to work with data, understand business economics, test assumptions, and explain conclusions clearly.
• Technical curiosity and fluency, with the ability to learn how AI training, evaluations, and agent workflows work and collaborate credibly with researchers and engineers; machine-learning researcher experience 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, checking their outputs, and understanding their limitations.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with AI infrastructure, enterprise customers, data operations, or a technical founder-led company.
• Relevant experience may come from 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 company goals, assign owners, resolve dependencies, and follow through on commitments.
• Own critical projects end to end across research, engineering, customer delivery, and go-to-market, from diagnosing ambiguous problems to delivering results.
• Define success for projects and build repeatable processes where useful.
• Establish and run focused planning and leadership reviews, maintain a useful view of company metrics, and clarify decisions and accountability without unnecessary process.
• Assess opportunities, pricing, partnerships, and resource allocation using customer conversations, market research, and quantitative analysis.
• Write recommendations that clearly explain trade-offs.
• Prepare decision briefs, investor and board materials, and internal communications for the CEO.
• Ensure customer, partner, and investor conversations lead to concrete next steps.
• Build and improve AI-assisted workflows for research, reporting, and operations; evaluate accuracy and usefulness and retain human judgment where it matters.
• Identify and address gaps in hiring, onboarding, information sharing, and collaboration that constrain team progress.
• During the first 90 days, learn the customers, product, delivery process, business priorities, and operational bottlenecks; establish a lightweight planning and review cadence; deliver a cross-functional project; and improve a recurring workflow using AI with a measurable benefit.

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 whose impact is visible.

What This Job Offers

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