Job description
by Nexcess: Chief of Staff – Performance Cloud Job Title Chief Of Staff – Performance Cloud Level Director (individual contributor, no direct reports) Working Hours/Arrangements 40 hours per week (9am to 6pm, including one hour of unpaid break) Hybrid Role – 3 Days per Week in the Office and 2 Days per Week working from home Salary & Bonus £125,000 - £145,000 + 10% performance bonus. Location Guildford office – 2000, Cathedral Square, Cathedral Hill, Guildford GU2 7YL, United Kingdom Travel Occasional - leadership offsites, data centre and customer visits (~10%) Reporting to Isaac Douglas, General Manager, Performance Cloud Why this role exists is the dedicated infrastructure and bare metal business within Nexcess. We run global infrastructure for customers who need the performance, control and reliability that commodity cloud doesn't give them. The business unit has more good opportunities than it has capacity to execute against, and the GM's time is the binding constraint. This role removes that constraint. The Chief of Staff runs the operating machinery of the BU - the cadence, the metrics, the follow-through - and personally leads the strategic work that matters most but has no natural owner. Critically, you also own the honest conversation about what we are not doing. This is not an assistant role, and it is not a project coordinator role. It is a senior seat with real judgement, real influence and a direct line to every decision the BU makes. What you'll own 1. The operating cadence and priorities You are responsible for how the business unit runs itself – running the operating rhythm and holding the organisation to it. • Run the leadership operating rhythm: weekly leadership meeting, monthly business review, quarterly planning and the annual cycle. You set the agenda, frame the decisions, capture the outcomes and chase the actions. • Own goal setting and performance tracking. Run the KPI process end to end - from target-setting through to the dashboard the leadership team actually uses. Make sure the numbers are trusted and the same in every room. The set spans commercial performance - revenue, pipeline, margin, churn and win rate - alongside operational measures, and each quarter’s plan is honest about the capacity available to deliver it. • Close the loop on decisions. Maintain a single view of what was decided, by whom, by when - and escalate early when something is drifting, rather than reporting it after the fact. • Prepare the GM and the BU for parent-company reporting. Board and Nexcess leadership updates, QBRs and ad hoc requests - you build the narrative and the supporting analysis. • Improve the machinery. Kill meetings that don't earn their place, simplify reporting, and reduce the internal overhead the leadership team carries. • Maintain the single view of committed priorities. Keep an unambiguous, current picture of what the BU has committed to, who owns it and what capacity it consumes. When a new opportunity or request enters the system, you frame the trade-off - what it displaces, what it costs, what slips - and force the decision rather than letting the work quietly absorb it. 2. Strategy and special projects You take on the highest-value work that sits between functions or ahead of the org chart. • Lead cross-functional initiatives end to end - market entry, product or pricing moves, go-to-market changes, cost and margin programmes, systems or process overhauls. You are accountable for the outcome, not just the plan. • Build the analysis behind big decisions. Market and competitive assessments, build/buy/partner cases, capacity and investment models, business cases with real numbers and honest assumptions. • Act as the GM's thinking partner. Pressure-test strategy, surface second-order consequences, and be willing to disagree in private before the decision is made. • Incubate what doesn't have an owner yet. Stand up new motions or functions, run them until they work, then hand them to a permanent owner and move on. • Run the front door for new opportunities. Triage what arrives - customer requests, partner approaches, internal ideas - into a quick, consistent view of size, fit and cost to serve, so the leadership team can say yes or no quickly and with evidence. • Own the commercial and market signal loop. Make sure customer, market and competitive intelligence reach the leadership table on a cadence rather than anecdotally - win/loss patterns, churn reasons, pricing pressure, competitor moves - and that it visibly changes what the BU prioritises. 3. Alignment and communication • Represent the GM in forums where a decision is needed but the GM can't be present - with clear, pre-agreed boundaries on what you can commit to. • Keep the leadership team aligned. Spot where two functions think they agree and don’t - and resolve it before it becomes a problem. • Connect the BU into the wider Nexcess organization. Own the day-to-day relationship with shared functions - marketing, product, engineering, finance and people - so the BU gets what it needs without the GM having to broker it. Manage those dependencies actively: know what each function owes us and by when, surface conflicts early, and make sure BU plans and priorities stay aligned to the company's cadence, strategy and reporting cycles in both directions. • Drive internal communication - all-hands content, leadership messaging, and making sure strategy is understood well below the leadership team. How success is measured First 90 days • You've mapped how the BU actually operates today - cadence, metrics, decision rights, where things get stuck - and given the GM an honest assessment. • The leadership operating rhythm is running with you at the centre of it, and the leadership team finds the meetings better than before you arrived. • You've built trusted relationships with each of the GM's direct reports and with key Nexcess counterparts in finance, product, marketing and people. • You own and have delivered at least one substantive piece of analysis or one initiative. • You’ve spent real time with customers and with the sales and support front line, and can describe why customers choose us and why they leave. First 12 months • There is one agreed set of BU metrics, refreshed on a reliable cadence, that both BU leadership and the parent company trust. • Decisions made in leadership meetings get executed - measurably fewer things fall through. • You have personally led two or three strategic initiatives to a result the GM would point to as material to the BU's performance. • The GM's time has visibly shifted toward customers, people and strategy, and away from internal coordination. • The leadership team comes to you directly for judgement calls, not just for scheduling. • There is one current view of committed priorities that the leadership team and shared functions both work from, and new asks are consciously traded against it rather than absorbed. What we're looking for Essential • 8–12 years' experience , including either a prior Chief of Staff role to a GM, CEO or business-unit leader, or a senior Business Operations / Strategy & Ops role in a scaling technology company. • Demonstrated ownership of an operating cadence - you have built or substantially improved an OKR/KPI process and a leadership meeting rhythm, not just participated in one. • Strong commercial and analytical fluency. Comfortable in the data and in a P&L; able to build a defensible model and explain it in plain language. • Customer-facing credibility. Comfortable in front of customers and in front of the sales floor - you will be a consumer of, and a contributor to, commercial conversations, not an observer of them. • Influence without authority. You will have no direct reports and will need functional leaders, some more senior than you, to change what they're doing. • Experience operating inside a matrixed organization . Securing commitments from shared functions you don't control, and holding them without escalating every time. • Excellent written communication. You can turn a messy situation into a one-page recommendation a busy executive can act on. • High discretion and sound judgement. You will see everything - commercial, financial and people-related - often before anyone else does. • Comfort with ambiguity, and low ego. Some weeks are strategy; some weeks are unglamorous cleanup. Both matter. Desirable • Experience in hosting, bare metal, cloud, data centre or adjacent B2B infrastructure. • Experience operating a business unit inside a larger group. • Consulting, corporate development or investment background alongside operating experience. • Hands-on with the tooling - BI and dashboarding, CRM, and project/work management systems. How we'll work together So, there is no ambiguity about the mandate: • You will have full visibility of the BU - the numbers, the plans, the people discussions and the GM's calendar and inbox context. • You will have explicit authority to convene the leadership team, set agendas, and ask any function for information or explanation. • You will not have authority over anyone's people or budget. Where you need a decision that isn't yours, we agree the boundary in advance. • We'll meet at the start and end of each week, plus daily as needed. Candour in both directions is the expectation - I want to hear the thing nobody else will say. What this role is not • An executive assistant. Diary and travel management sit elsewhere. • A pure PMO or delivery-management function, though you will hold delivery to account. • A shadow decision-maker. You inform and shape decisions and drive execution; accountability stays with the GM and the functional leaders. We offer · Salary: £125,000 - £145,000 + 10% performance bonus. · Private healthcare – Once probation period is passed · Embrace parenthood with 18 weeks generous paid leave after completion of 15 months’ continuous service · Pension contribution – 5% of salary · 28 annual leave days plus all Bank Holidays in each holiday year in England and Wales · 10 days working from anywhere in the world following completion of probationary period · Office Lunches – Deliveroo to the value of £14 each day · Mobile phone bill paid to the value of £80 (subject to BiK taxation) · Casual dress code · Use of Apple MacBook Pro laptop – Mouse and Keyboard · AirPods Headset Disclaimer is committed to equality and diversity for all staff and applications from individuals are encouraged regardless of age, disability, sex, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief and marriage and civil partnerships. Please click here to access our Equal Opportunities Policy. SERVERSCOM UK LTD. also reserves the right to modify, interpret, or apply this job description in a way that best supports the organisational needs. The job description in no way creates or implies an employment contract. Also, please review our candidate privacy notice in relation to the collection and processing of your personal data. Should you be unsuccessful in your application for the role you have applied for and would like for to keep your details for any future roles for twelve (12) months please let us know in writing.
Who We Are , powered by Nexcess, delivers specialised Infrastructure as a Service solutions for organizations where performance, scalability, and reliable execution are essential. As part of Nexcess, contributes deep infrastructure expertise to a broader cloud technology organisation serving businesses worldwide. Our platform provides compute, storage, and networking services across the US, Europe, and Asia, with access to premium server hosting solutions in more than 26 data centers globally. We support leading enterprises and high-growth companies across industries including Big Data, AdTech, FinTech, Gaming, iGaming, Blockchain, and Streaming.
