Founder's Office: Head of Special Projects

Job description

Partner with our Founder/CEO Joseph (2x founder, $50MM+ raised from Tier 1 VCs like Accel + Menlo + 100s of angels) to build and run the operational engine of a fast-moving, AI-first startup. This is the person who turns a make-or-break 12 months into a machine that keeps getting sharper. You'll take our operations from 1 to 10 - the systems, rigor, and cross-functional execution. Two things to know up front, and if this still gets you fired up, keep reading. :) 1. This is a senior individual-contributor role - you're in the work yourself, doing it, not managing a team to do it (yet) 2. We're in-person 4-5 days/week at our office in the heart of Hudson Yards, NYC. ❤️ KNOETIC AI + OUR CHIEF PEOPLE OFFICER NETWORK ❤️ Our mission is to build the "Second Brain" for every Chief People Officer and their HR team. We're backed by $50MM from Accel, EQT, Menlo, and 100s of legendary angels (Adam Grant, Shreyas Doshi, and more). Our "right brain" (CPOHQ) crowdsources the best practices, playbooks, and templates of the world's smartest leaders. Our "left brain" (People Analytics) gives companies millions of data points, analytics, and insights to run better companies. We're a beautiful blend of consumer + enterprise product that serves 1000s of C-level execs from companies like Box, Figma, dbt Labs, Lyft, Notion, and OpenAI. ✨ THE ROLE ✨ We're hiring a senior operator to be the operational center of gravity for the company. You'll partner directly with our Founder/CEO (Joseph), and you'll be the person who makes sure the trains run on time at a high bar - across product, engineering, GTM, community, and people. Concretely, you will: - Project manage every workstream. Drive execution across the whole company so ideas turn into shipped work, on time, with no dropped balls. You're the connective tissue between functions. - Drive the engineering and product roadmap. Work shoulder-to-shoulder with our technical lead to keep eng, product, and design moving - scoping work, QA-ing on production, triaging fixes, and closing the loop - so Joseph stays focused on the highest-leverage bets. - Run on metrics. Own the company's source of truth - the dashboards and definitions leadership steers by - and the data plumbing (PostHog, HubSpot) that keeps it honest. - Bring operational rigor. Install the cadences, systems, and accountability a fast team needs to scale without breaking. - Make "how we work" agent-first. Wire up the automations, agents, and pipelines that lets us increase productivity with zero added headcount. - Scale what works from 1 to 10. Turn operations held together by heroics today into repeatable systems. ✨ EXAMPLES OF WHAT YOU'LL OWN ✨ - The product roadmap's execution. Keep eng, product, and design in lockstep - scope, QA, ship - and own the rollout end to end. - Product PMF sprints. Drive a product to PMF - set the goal, define the metrics, and rally the team around it week over week. - The metrics & analytics stack. The single source of truth - dashboards, retention curves, and the automation that keeps our data systems in sync. - The GTM & automation stack. The tools and AI workflows (N8N, Clay, HubSpot, MCPs, and whatever ships next) - standing them up with zero eng support. - Flagship events. ELEVATE (our in-person CPO conference) and CPOHQ roundtables & dinners, end to end. - Hiring & onboarding. Source, close, and onboard engineers, operators, and other key hires as we grow. - + dozens more, across every function. ✨ ABOUT YOU ✨ Two things make this person: the way you're wired, and the track record that proves it. How you're wired - You're a force-of-nature operator who switches altitudes from 10,000-foot strategy to 1-foot detail without losing a step - and loves both. - You're a barrel, not ammunition (as Keith Rabois puts it): unreasonably resourceful, self-driven, and most alive in the trenches. Hand you an ambiguous mandate and you take it from 0 to 1 to live with taste, urgency, and near-zero handholding. - You bring militant operational discipline. You're who teams trust with the hardest, messiest, most cross-functional projects - and you make them look easy. - And you're a pleasure to do it with. Positive, optimistic, steady under pressure. What you bring - You can speak engineering. You don't write the code, but you can sit with eng, scope the work, QA it, and keep a roadmap moving without slowing anyone down. - You're AI-native. AI is part of how you think and work - you've found tools and automations that 95% of your peers don't understand yet, and they make you dramatically more productive. - You're quantitative and systems-savvy. Sharp with spreadsheets, dangerous with modern tools, and you decide from metrics, not vibes. You can ship an automation or a dashboard without waiting on eng. (Nice to have: product analytics tools like PostHog.) And you've got the receipts. We think the right person could be one of two profiles (and we're happy to be proven wrong): - The operator with elite training. A few years at a top consulting firm or bank (MBB / top-tier or equivalent), where you climbed fast, then moved into a startup and operated in the trenches. The rigor of a top firm, the scrappiness of a startup. - The startup-grown generalist. You've spent your career inside high-growth startups (Series A/B/C), started junior, and earned your way up as the person who gets things done across every function. Either way: 4-7 years as a top performer in roles that demand extreme rigor and intensity, with 12+ months (ideally more) in a scrappy 0-1 environment where you saw firsthand how engineering, product, and design actually work together. ✨ WHAT WE BELIEVE ✨ In this era of AI, we can (and will) build a billion-dollar company with a few dozen employees. Every spot on this ship is sacred, and our hiring bar is intensely high (one bad hire costs more than an empty seat). - We only hire the best of the best - hardworking, passionate, high-IQ, genuinely good people. - Outlier work ethic = outlier results. Work smart and hard - they go together. - The bar is always rising. What's good today won't be good enough tomorrow. - This is our moment, and we'll do whatever it takes to seize it.