Chief of Staff

The role

Build the operating layer with us.

Laurelin is founder-led and pre-scale. There is no established operating layer to inherit. This role is a hybrid: strategic number two, chief of staff, and practical personal aide to founder Joe Finberg—protecting his time while building the systems, communication, and follow-through required to move from financing through the first experimental program and first hires.

This is a hands-on execution role, not a conventional corporate chief-of-staff post or a calendar-only role. You would move between investor and government-funding work, recruiting, vendor and contractor coordination, written communications, ambiguous special projects, and the exact daily logistics that keep the founder effective. The standard is simple: create clarity without adding bureaucracy, and make sure consequential decisions become completed work.

What you would own

• Translate the founder’s priorities into a lightweight operating cadence with explicit owners, decisions, dependencies, and follow-through.
• Protect the founder’s time and attention by triaging requests, preparing decisions, maintaining context, and closing loops before they become distractions.
• Own calendar, travel, and meeting logistics; prepare documents and briefing materials; track expenses; and provide practical on-the-ground help, including local driving when needed.
• Prepare and coordinate financing diligence, investor cadence and communications, data-room materials, and post-meeting actions with precise source control.
• Coordinate government-funding and SBIR work, including submission calendars, source materials, outside contributors, and follow-through.
• Build the recruiting operation for Laurelin’s first hires, including role scorecards, candidate pipelines, interview logistics, references, and candidate communication.
• Coordinate work across vendors, contractors, advisors, and external legal, accounting, insurance, facilities, recruiting, and fabrication partners.
• Own high-leverage special projects from an ambiguous brief through research, recommendation, execution, and documented closeout.
• Create decision memos, meeting preparation, operating updates, and durable records that are concise enough to use and rigorous enough to trust.

What we are looking for

• A record of personally driving complex, cross-functional work to completion in an early-stage company, technical program, investment environment, or similarly demanding setting.
• Exceptional written communication, analytical judgment, and attention to detail; you can make a complicated situation legible without flattening what matters.
• High agency and practical range: equally comfortable building a model, running a process, drafting a memo, calling a vendor, or fixing the underlying system.
• Sound judgment with confidential information and the confidence to surface disagreement, risk, or missing evidence directly.
• Willingness to work closely with the founder on-site in San Francisco and adapt as the company’s highest-leverage constraint changes.

Especially useful

• Military leadership experience is strongly preferred, especially service as a commissioned officer, senior enlisted leader, aide-de-camp, executive officer, operations officer, or in an analogous command-support role. Candidates with comparably demanding civilian experience supporting a principal and coordinating operations are also encouraged.
• Experience as a chief of staff, founder’s associate, trusted personal aide, startup operator, investor, or program lead in deep tech, hardware, energy, or advanced manufacturing.
• Technical literacy sufficient to ask sharp questions, preserve the meaning of engineering work, and distinguish evidence from aspiration.
• Experience with venture financing, government grants or SBIR programs, recruiting, laboratory or facility setup, or building an operating function from zero.