Chief of Staff Greater San Francisco, CA Area

About Collinear

Collinear is a data research lab that builds simulated worlds to train and evaluate AI agents. We partner with frontier labs to build high-signal custom RL environments, tasks, and graders for coding, knowledge work, and science domains. Collinear is also a pioneer in frontier evals: CWE-bench, MatFlowBench, and FrontierCUA

The role

We’re looking for a Chief of Staff to partner with the CEO and help build the company behind that work. You’ll turn our most important priorities into decisions, coordinated execution, and measurable results. One week, you might evaluate a new market opportunity; the next, you might improve how we deliver a customer project or prepare for an investor conversation.

This is a hands-on role for someone who can move between strategy and execution, earn the trust of technical and commercial teams, and take ownership when the path is unclear. You’ll build enough understanding of our technology, customers, and economics to challenge assumptions and make sound trade-offs.

What you’ll do

Drive company priorities. Work with the CEO and functional leaders to define the highest-impact goals, assign owners, resolve dependencies, and follow through on commitments.

Own critical projects end to end. Take ambiguous problems from diagnosis to delivery across research, engineering, customer delivery, and go-to-market. Establish what success means, do the work, and build a repeatable process where it helps.

Build our operating cadence. Run focused planning and leadership reviews, maintain a useful view of company metrics, and make decisions and accountability clear without adding unnecessary process.

Sharpen strategic decisions. Combine customer conversations, market research, and quantitative analysis to assess opportunities, pricing, partnerships, and resource allocation. Write clear recommendations that make tradeoffs explicit.

Extend the CEO’s effectiveness. Prepare decision briefs, investor and board materials, and internal communications. Ensure important customer, partner, and investor conversations lead to concrete next steps.

Make us more effective with AI. Build and improve AI-assisted workflows for research, reporting, and operations. Evaluate their accuracy and usefulness, and keep human judgment where it matters.

Help the organization scale. Identify gaps in how we hire, onboard, share information, and work together; solve the ones that most constrain the team’s progress.

What you bring

A track record of taking difficult, loosely defined projects through to measurable results in a fast-moving environment. Relevant paths include startup operations, product, business operations, consulting with execution experience, or building a company yourself.

Strong analytical judgment: you can work with data, understand business economics, test assumptions, and explain your conclusions clearly.

Technical curiosity and fluency. You can learn how AI training, evaluations, and agent workflows work and collaborate credibly with researchers and engineers. You don’t need to be an ML researcher.

Excellent writing and communication. You distill complex information, surface disagreement constructively, and help teams reach decisions.

Initiative, discretion, and dependable follow-through. You handle sensitive information thoughtfully and influence across teams through trust and sound judgment.

Practical experience using AI tools to improve your work, including checking their outputs and knowing their limits.

Experience with AI infrastructure, enterprise customers, data operations, or a technical founder-led company is especially useful. We care more about what you’ve built and delivered than a particular title, degree, or career path.

What success looks like in your first 90 days

You understand our customers, product, delivery process, and business priorities well enough to identify the most important operational bottlenecks.

You’ve established a lightweight planning and review cadence with clear owners, actionable metrics, and reliable follow-through.

You’ve delivered a meaningful cross-functional project and improved at least one recurring workflow using AI, with a measurable benefit.

The CEO and team will have clearer priorities, faster decisions, and more time for their highest-impact work.

Why Collinear

You’ll work close to the frontier of AI capability development and help shape how a technical company grows. The role offers broad responsibility, direct partnership with the CEO, and the opportunity to build systems and lead initiatives whose impact you can see.