Chief of Staff at Sapiom

FOUNDING CHIEF OF STAFF ROLE: EXECUTIVE PROXY & COMPANY OS ARCHITECT We’re hiring a Founding Chief of Staff to act as the Executive Proxy to Sapiom’s Founder & CEO. The CEO architects the product and vision. You architect the Company Operating System. Your job is to be a force multiplier, ensuring the operational machinery behind the CEO runs with precision, speed, and zero friction, so the CEO can stay focused on the highest-leverage work: product strategy, recruiting, and strategic growth. We’re building the financial rails for the agentic economy, a shift as significant as the credit card. Your mandate is to design the operational backbone that allows Sapiom to scale from an early-stage company into a global institution. This is a high-trust, high-agency, systems-architecture role, intentionally systemic, at the center of the company. You’ll turn strategic ambiguity into operational clarity, translating Founder Intent into durable, automated, high-velocity company motions across Ops, GTM, Talent, and Capital. This is not a support role. It’s a leadership role that ensures the business engine runs with the same code-level rigor, reliability, and precision as our product engine. WHAT YOU WILL BUILD - Company OS: You will architect the systems that run the business (Finance, Ops, Legal, Compliance, Hiring). You don't just "keep the lights on"; you build a scalable engine designed for hyper-growth. The operational DNA you define now will determine whether Sapiom can scale 100x without breaking. - Capital & Narrative Architecture: You don't just manage investors; you help define the category. You synthesize market signals into a coherent narrative that positions Sapiom as inevitable infrastructure for the agentic economy. You orchestrate future funding processes end-to-end: data room, decks, diligence pipelines, and ensuring that story and data are always aligned. - Commercial Architecture: You support the business side of our Design Partner program and partnership ecosystem. Engineering handles integration; you help structure the deal. You define ICPs, structure LOIs and success criteria, manage onboarding, and translate customer discovery into concrete product direction and positioning. - Strategic Leverage & Red Teaming: You sit in the critical meetings (board, product strategy, partnerships, customers calls) not to capture actions, but to pressure-test decisions. You surface misalignment, identify blind spots, and red-team the CEO thinking before it hits the wider organization. You turn founder intent into execution while maintaining a relentless shipping cadence. - Talent & Culture Architecture: You don't just fill seats; you engineer the team. You design the recruiting engine, the interview loops, and the "Bar Raiser" mechanism to ensure every hire raises the average. You act as the interim manager for new functions, leading those early teams until you recruit the long-term leader to replace yourself. - "Automated" Ops Layer: You believe that if a task needs to be done more than three times, it should be automated. You use code, tooling, and AI agents to eliminate operational drag and build leverage into everything you touch. WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE (6 MONTHS) - CEO Leverage: The CEO is meaningfully unblocked, leveraged, and has shifted from split-focus to 90% Product, Vision & Strategic Sales / 10% Operational Oversight. You have absorbed the entire "Run the Business" load. - Commercial Traction: A clear, validated early ICP is established. 5-10 Design Partners are live, structured, and feeding signals directly into the product. - Systemic Cadence: A repeatable GTM and operating cadence exists. The internal engine runs predictably and automatically. - Narrative Dominance: Sapiom’s market narrative is coherent, differentiated, and credible. We are recognized as a category leader. - Decisive Action: Strategic initiatives move forward cleanly and decisively; no stalls, no ambiguity, no drift. GROWTH TRAJECTORY: "PERPETUAL UNLOCK" You will repeatedly: 1. Step into a function (e.g., Ops, Finance, Compliance, GTM), 2. Stabilize and systematize it, 3. Hire a world-class domain owner, 4. Hand it off. Your success is measured by how quickly you can fire yourself from a function and move to the next highest-impact bottleneck. You are the company’s highest-leverage operator. WHO YOU ARE - Executive Proxy: You can debate strategy with the CEO at night and handle operational execution the next morning. You have the judgment and trust to speak on behalf of the CEO in high-stakes situations, internally and externally. - Technical Authority: You provide 10x leverage because you can duplicate the CEO’s presence in technical conversations. You can hold your own with partner CTOs, represent Sapiom with developers, and identify technical growth wedges. You don't need to write the code, but you need to understand the primitives to represent the product confidently and sell the vision when needed. - Operational Excellence: You treat the company’s backend (legal, finance, people ops) with the same uptime and reliability expectations as a production API. In financial infrastructure, sloppy ops are existential risk. You build systems that are audit-ready by default. - AI-Native Operator:You refuse to solve problems with headcount alone. You use LLMs and agents to automate workflows and systems. You believe the modern CoS is part human judgment, part AI leverage. - Team Builder & Leader: You know that "Teams are the Moat". You have the EQ to manage early employees, resolve conflicts, and set a high-performance culture. You build teams that people fight to join. - Low Ego / High Impact: You care about outcomes, not ownership. You’re happy to build and then hand off a high-performing team if it advances the mission. WHY JOIN SAPIOM We’re building the Financial OS for the Agentic Economy. Every generational shift in commerce creates a new financial giant: - In-person → Visa / Mastercard - Internet → PayPal / Stripe / Adyen - Agentic → ? This is not incremental SaaS; it’s foundational infrastructure. We’re building the next Stripe for the machine economy. You’ll join a highly experienced team with deep DNA (Shopify, Google, Affirm) backed by top-tier investors (Accel, Gradient, Menlo, Anthropic). We operate with high standards and high support. You’re not joining as an employee, you’re joining as a founding architect. In ten years, you’ll be able to say: “I built the engine that powered the machine economy.” REPORTING - Reports to: CEO - Direct Reports: Initially 1 Workplace & Business Operations Manager