Eng Operations and Chief of Staff to the CTO

Nametag•Ann Arbor, MI

4d•Hybrid

About The Position

Nametag helps companies verify the real person behind high-risk workforce actions, from account recovery to identity checks, before attackers can exploit the gap. Deepfakes, social engineering, and stolen credentials have made "who is actually on the other side of this request?" a critical infrastructure problem. We are building the identity verification and account protection layer companies use to answer that question quickly, securely, and with less friction for real users. We're looking for someone to be the operational center of gravity for our engineering organization. This is a blended role. Part of it (about 10%) is classic executive support: calendar, travel, inbox triage, meeting logistics, expenses, and the steady work of protecting a leader's time and attention. Part of it is chief of staff work (about 30%): preparing for meetings that matter, tracking the commitments made in them, chasing the decisions that are stalling, and being a trusted second read on what's actually going on. And part of it is program management for engineering (60%): keeping initiatives visible, running the operating cadence, wrangling tickets and making sure things that were agreed to in a planning meeting still exist three weeks later. What makes this role demanding is the technical context. You don't need to write code, and we're not asking you to. But you will be scheduling around incident response, taking notes in architecture discussions, tracking a compliance audit, and summarizing an engineering status for the exec team. We're also an AI-forward company, and this role should reflect that. A lot of what has historically made this job heavy — drafting, summarizing, reformatting, chasing status — is work that modern tooling handles well. We'd like you to lean on it aggressively so your time goes to judgment and relationships instead of transcription. This role is based in Ann Arbor. Nametag is remote-first overall, but this position works closely enough with our CTO that we want you local, in the office together at least one day a week.

Requirements

Work authorization required: Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States for any employer without current or future need for visa sponsorship.
Based in or near Ann Arbor, Michigan, and able to be in the office at least one day per week.
3+ years in executive support, chief of staff, program or project management, or business operations — ideally some combination.
Exceptional organization and follow-through. You track commitments without being asked to, and things do not fall through you.
Comfort with technical subject matter. You can sit in an engineering discussion, follow it, take notes that are actually useful, and summarize it accurately for a non-technical audience.
Strong written communication. Much of this role is producing clear, brief written material under time pressure.
Sound judgment about confidentiality. You'll handle personnel, compensation, and security-sensitive information routinely.
Comfort with startup ambiguity — shifting priorities, undefined processes, and problems that are yours because you noticed them.
Fluency with modern software tooling and a genuine appetite for using AI assistance in daily work.

Nice To Haves

Experience supporting a technical executive — CTO, VP Engineering, or similar.
Experience in a software or security company.
Program or project management experience with engineering teams specifically.
Experience with compliance or audit coordination, such as SOC 2.
Recruiting coordination experience.
Experience building internal process or documentation from scratch rather than inheriting it.

Responsibilities

Run the engineering operating cadence — planning, status, retrospectives — so that it happens consistently and produces something useful.
Track initiatives across teams: what's in flight, what's blocked, what's at risk, and who owes what to whom.
Coordinate the cross-functional work that has no natural owner, including compliance evidence collection, audit preparation, and recruiting logistics.
Maintain the internal documentation and trackers that keep engineering legible to the rest of the company.
Capture decisions and action items, then follow them to completion.
Prepare briefing material and summaries for internal reviews, board-adjacent material, and cross-functional meetings.
Be an early, discreet sounding board.
Notice what's being dropped across the organization and raise it before it becomes a problem.
Own the CTO's calendar, making real prioritization decisions rather than just finding open slots.
Manage travel, expenses, and the logistics of offsites and team gatherings.
Triage inbound requests, route what can be routed, and surface what genuinely needs the CTO.
Prepare for meetings in advance: agenda, context, prior commitments, and what a good outcome looks like.
Use AI tooling routinely for drafting, summarizing, meeting notes, and status synthesis.
Build repeatable workflows rather than doing the same manual assembly every week.