Chief of Staff
New York City | Full-time | On-site in SoHo, five days per week
Reports to the CEO and works directly with the founding team
ABOUT HELIOS
Helios is building a new kind of company to solve America’s hardest problems, starting with the government interaction layer.
Government shapes every consequential market, but the infrastructure connecting public institutions and private organizations remains fragmented, manual, and difficult to navigate. Helios is rebuilding that layer.
Our core platform, Proxi, gives organizations the intelligence they need to understand what government is doing, why it matters, and what to do next. From that foundation, we design and deploy secure, mission-specific systems for government agencies, enterprises, and institutions operating in complex and highly regulated environments.
We bring together frontier AI, deep public-sector expertise, and forward-deployed execution. Our team includes leaders and builders from the White House, U.S. Department of State, Datadog, and Microsoft. We are backed by leading institutional investors and trusted by organizations working on high-stakes problems across government and industry.
THE ROLE
We are hiring a Chief of Staff to serve as the operating connective tissue across Helios. This person will work directly with the founders and across the company to turn priorities into execution, keep teams aligned, and ensure that important work reaches completion.
This is a hands-on operating role, not a strategy-only position. On any given day, you may move a customer implementation forward, prepare an investor update, run a cross-functional operating review, improve an internal process, conduct market research, help coordinate a hire, or make sure a critical follow-up happens on time. You should be equally comfortable moving between strategic questions and tactical execution.
The right person is highly organized, responsive, resourceful, and calm under pressure. You create clarity in fast-moving environments, communicate with strong judgment, and take personal responsibility for making sure nothing falls through the cracks.
WHAT YOU WILL OWN
Daily Operations and Execution
- Translate founder and company priorities into clear workstreams, owners, deadlines, and operating plans.
- Enhance the company’s operating cadence, including priority reviews, project tracking, decision capture, and follow-through.
- Support multiple concurrent initiatives across product, customers, commercial efforts, hiring, finance, and external engagements.
- Identify gaps before they become problems, surface risks early, and step in directly when an initiative needs additional ownership.
- Build lightweight systems and processes that improve visibility, accountability, and execution without creating unnecessary bureaucracy.
- Maintain a clear source of truth for company priorities, commitments, owners, and deadlines.
Customer Success
- Support onboarding, implementation, adoption, and ongoing success for strategic customers.
- Coordinate internal owners around customer commitments, product requests, deliverables, renewals, and expansion opportunities.
- Maintain a clear view of customer health, open issues, upcoming milestones, and next actions.
- Capture customer feedback and translate it into actionable input for the founders, product team, and broader company.
- Ensure customer communications are timely, polished, and followed through to resolution.
- Step into customer-facing work when additional coordination, research, or execution is required.
Commercial Operations, Pipeline, and Research
- Support pipeline management by maintaining accurate stages, owners, next steps, and follow-up dates across commercial opportunities.
- Prepare for pipeline reviews and ensure important opportunities continue moving between meetings.
- Conduct rapid market, customer, policy, procurement, and competitive research when the company needs a clear answer quickly.
- Support account planning, partnership development, and the creation of targeted customer and market materials.
- Contribute to strategic messaging and positioning across sales, fundraising, recruiting, and external communications.
- Ensure important introductions, proposals, customer requests, and commercial follow-ups never go unanswered.
Founder and External Support
- Prepare founders for important customer, partner, government, and investor meetings, then drive the resulting decisions and follow-ups.
- Support investor communications, fundraising workstreams, board preparation, and external relationship management as needed.
- Draft or refine internal and external materials, including updates, briefing notes, presentations, and strategic messaging.
- Represent the founders’ priorities with discretion and sound judgment across internal and external stakeholders.
- Anticipate what the founders will need and create leverage before being asked.
People Operations and Internal Communications
- Support candidate coordination, onboarding, team planning, and other people operations alongside the founders.
- Create clear internal communications that keep the team aligned on decisions, priorities, responsibilities, and deadlines.
- Help strengthen operating norms and company culture as Helios grows.
- Coordinate team meetings, planning sessions, and occasional offsites with clear objectives and documented outcomes.
- Handle sensitive employee and organizational matters with maturity and discretion.
WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE
- Every meaningful company priority has a clear owner, next step, and deadline.
- Customer commitments are visible, coordinated internally, and completed without repeated founder intervention.
- The founders spend less time chasing information and follow-ups and more time on the highest-leverage decisions and relationships.
- The team has a reliable operating cadence and knows what matters, what was decided, and what happens next.
- Pipeline and customer information is accurate enough to support real decisions at any moment.
- Risks, bottlenecks, and missed commitments are surfaced early rather than discovered after the fact.
- Internal and external stakeholders experience Helios as highly responsive, organized, and reliable.
YOU MIGHT BE A FIT IF YOU
- Have 5 or more years of experience in a demanding operating environment such as a high-growth startup, consulting firm, technology company, government office, political organization, or similarly fast-paced institution.
- Are an exceptional project manager who can run several complex workstreams at once without losing the details.
- Have a demonstrated record of closing loops. You respond, follow up, document decisions, and keep work moving without needing to be chased.
- Can move fluidly between strategic thinking and hands-on execution, including work that is unglamorous but essential.
- Write clearly and quickly, with the judgment to adapt your message for employees, customers, government stakeholders, and backers.
- Exercise discretion with sensitive customer, employee, commercial, and investor information.
- Are comfortable making decisions with incomplete information and creating structure where little exists.
- Build trust across different functions and personalities while maintaining high standards and direct accountability.
- Have strong working familiarity with U.S. political institutions, government processes, or the public-policy environment.
- Use modern productivity, collaboration, CRM, and AI tools fluently and are eager to improve how the company operates.
- Want a high-intensity, in-person startup role and are prepared to flex beyond standard business hours when customers or company priorities require it.
NICE TO HAVE
- Experience with government contracting, public-sector procurement, or federal and state sales cycles.
- Experience in B2B SaaS customer success, implementation, account management, or commercial operations.
- Experience supporting fundraising, investor relations, or board communications.
- A background in strategic communications, policy research, market intelligence, or political operations.
- Experience helping a founder-led organization scale its people, processes, and internal operating systems.
WORKING AT HELIOS
This is a full-time, in-person role based in our SoHo office in New York City. Team members are expected to work from the office five days per week. The role requires occasional travel, including potential travel to Washington, D.C., customer locations, and company events.
Helios is a fast-moving startup with ambitious goals. This is not a conventional 9-to-5 role. We expect flexibility during important customer moments, product launches, fundraising periods, and other company-critical work. In return, this role offers unusual access, responsibility, and the opportunity to shape a company at an early and consequential stage.
HOW WE WORK
- Own outcomes, not just assigned tasks. Identify what needs to happen and drive it through completion.
- Move quickly without lowering the standard. Speed and rigor are complementary.
- Stay close to the mission and the user. The best decisions begin with the real problem.
- Work across boundaries. Everyone contributes beyond the narrow limits of a job title.
- Communicate directly. We value clear thinking, honest feedback, and low-ego collaboration.
- Build for the real world. Our systems must perform in complex, regulated, and high-stakes environments.
COMPENSATION
The base salary range for this role is $150,000 to $200,000 per year, plus meaningful equity and benefits. The final offer within this range will depend on the candidate’s experience, skills, and qualifications.
EQUAL OPPORTUNITY
Helios is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate candidates based on their abilities, experience, and potential to contribute to our mission. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other status protected by applicable law.