Chief of Staff

About the role

Preference Model is building automated ML research engineering. The role centers on owning how the company runs on a daily basis so that the leadership team can focus on customers, fundraising, and long-term strategy. You will be responsible for finance operations, vendor relationships, office management, and team knowledge systems. In this position, you will partner closely with HR and Recruiting to streamline hiring and onboarding. You will also own event and conference planning, representing the company at key moments. The role is designed for someone who enjoys building systems from scratch and iterating based on real-world feedback. You will report directly to a co-founder and act as the primary operations lead across the organization.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Vendor Management: Own vendor management end to end, including evaluating needs, selecting partners, and renegotiating or consolidating contracts where costs are not competitive.
• Build Automations: Put every recurring bill on autopay and run a monthly expense review that costs founders under 30 minutes, with anomalies flagged automatically before anyone has to ask.
• Finance & Compliance: Own tax filings and accountant requests end to end with our external accountants, ensuring deadlines never turn into a fire, and maintain SoC 2 compliance and other security-related operational standards.
• Onboarding & People: Partner with HR Consultant and Founding Recruiter to rebuild onboarding so that every new hire has accounts, equipment, and context within their first week, and consolidate Notion into one current source of truth that is easy to search.
• General Operations: Run a regular retro cadence with tracked follow-ups to ensure continuous improvement across teams.
• Office Management: Run the office day to day and drive decisions related to space, lease, and equipment to support team productivity.
• People Operations: Grow into the hiring loop so that within 6 months you can take candidate intro chats and run culture interviews when needed.
• Special Projects
• Team Building: Own offsites and team events end to end, from planning and budgeting through logistics and follow-up to ensure alignment and morale.
• Special Projects
• Conference Planning: Plan and run our presence at AI conferences, handling booth and sponsorship decisions, candidate and customer touchpoints, and post-event follow-up.
• Adaptive Scope: Whatever we discover your strengths to be, we would love for you to expand in that direction as there is room for this role to grow and expand in scope.
• Cross-functional Support: Act as the go-to operations person who unblocks founders by handling details that might otherwise distract them from strategy and customer work.
• Documentation and Knowledge: Consolidate operational workflows and playbooks so that key processes are transparent and repeatable.
• Communication: Over-communicate by default and keep messages short, providing frequent updates so that no one has to chase you for status.
• Culture Carrier: Represent the culture of the company in every interaction, modeling ownership, rigor, and empathy.
• Prioritization: Prioritize ruthlessly and adapt quickly as business needs evolve, ensuring that high-impact work is always visible.

Requirements

• You have owned operations at a company under 100 people, and you built the systems rather than inheriting them from a larger organization.
• You are comfortable on the finance side of operations, including working with budgets, vendors, and payment schedules.
• You notice details others miss, such as double charges, auto-renewals nobody noticed, and seat counts nobody updated, and then you build the checklist so it cannot happen twice.
• You make the people around you faster by removing operational blockers and handling unglamorous work without being asked.
• You defuse tension rather than escalating it, and you approach conflict with calm, clear communication.
• You over-communicate by default and keep your messages short, providing frequent updates so that status checks never require follow-up.
• You represent the culture of the company in every decision and interaction, serving as a role model for new hires and partners.
• You prioritize ruthlessly and adapt fast, changing course when data shows that current plans are not optimal.
• Familiarity with the modern operations stack, including spend tools like Brex or Ramp, an HRIS like Rippling or Gusto, Notion, or close equivalents.
• Experience planning conferences, offsites, or field events against a real budget and with cross-functional stakeholders.
• Experience in a candidate-facing role, even informally, where you represented the company with professionalism.
• Experience as the first operations hire at a fast-growing startup, where you had to build processes from minimal structure.

Practical notes

This is a 5 day in office position in our downtown San Francisco office.