Chief of Staff

Job Description:

Most common diseases are still treated with blunt instruments – pills and injections that hit the whole body, side-effects and all. Eligo does something fundamentally different: we turn the microbiome already living inside you into a programmable drug factory to fix disease at its source. A genuinely new class of medicine – never tried in people before.

We’ve just crossed from the lab into our first tests in humans: the point where a platform stops being a promise and becomes a drug. The next two years – first therapeutic clinical data, our next raise, pharma partnerships – will decide whether we become the company that defines a new field of medicine.

We’re ~35 international Eligonauts in Paris, co-founded by scientists from MIT and Rockefeller and backed by top-tier investors across Silicon Valley and Europe ($50M+ raised). Our science runs in Nature, Nature Biotechnology and Science Translational Medicine — picked up by The Economist, the BBC and the New York Times — sits behind 75 issued patents, and earned us a spot on the World Economic Forum’s 30 Most Innovative Companies. We’ve already proven the interest in the platform through multiple large-pharma collaborations.

Eligonauts are driven by one thing: getting genuinely new and frontier science to patients with real unmet needs. We embrace diversity and equal opportunity and are committed to building diverse teams.

​

​

​

— What this role actually is —

​

You’ll work with me, Xavier (CEO at Eligo), and the leadership team. You’ll be in the engine room, and you’ll own three things – and the throughline is simple: you run these better than I would, and that’s what frees me and the leadership team to be able to focus on our core value-added missions. My leverage is the output of your ownership – not your job description.

• How the company runs and how it scales. You’re the guardian and the improver of our operating system: the cadence, the foresight, and the quality bar that let a leadership team get ahead of its problems instead of chasing them. You also run the operational backbone in real life – finance and HR ops (budget, investor reporting, financial reporting, insurance), corporate and legal ops (board prep, ESOP, contracts, grants liaison), internal ops (IT, facilities, procurement, accounting). Anything that has to actually happen for a clinical biotech to operate, you own or you make sure happens — and you hunt the friction that slows us down, cutting latency wherever it appears. As we mature into a clinical company, you’re the person who makes sure the wheels stay on and the machine speeds up.
• Making the critical moments land – and sharpening the hard calls. Board, partners, investors, conferences, internal & external comms – prep starts early, the thinking is structured, the standard is high. You’ll be the guardian of making sure the prep starts way ahead of time, and manage the process and internal stakeholders to enable flawless execution. On the leadership team’s proposals, you’ll be critical to pressure-tests them before they leave the room.
• Special projects. Pipeline positioning, comp framework, JPM prep, leading our next grant and non-dilutive funding, making us an AI-native company, company offsite – the work that doesn’t have a home anywhere else yet and critically matters.

If you’re done watching other people build, this is the inside seat. You’ll see how the rouages of a biotech actually turn – and you’ll be the one tightening them. And when they turn, I get to be the CEO this company needs.

I’ll give you trust, autonomy, and real brainstorming time. I expect grit, proactivity, humility, and excellence in return.

​

​

— I’m looking for someone who is —

• Extremely ambitious and mission motivated
• Confident enough to give me feedback and push back hard
• Learns quickly and can teach themself anything; executes quickly
• Humble, low ego, high EQ and pragmatic
• Strong, logical thinker and writer
• Obsessively organized, with an extremely high quality bar – higher than mine
• Curious and who likes to question under the surface and improve systems and processes
• Great at the details, energized by hands-on work
• No specific background is strictly necessary, but you should be confident that you can jump in and provide value ASAP!

​

​

— Your day-to-day might include —

• Running the operational machinery – HR, IT, invoicing, vendor and contract pipeline with our lawyers, monthly close with our accountant, facilities – so the company actually works, every week
• Owning the cadence of quarterly financial investor updates, grant administration, non-dilutive reporting
• Maintaining the friction log – every recurring slowdown identified, triaged, killed
• Sitting with each leader monthly to find what’s eating their time, and removing it
• Circling with the team to see what deliverables I owe them
• Identifying and extinguishing fires
• Helping improve our team comms and organization
• Sitting in for me in meetings
• Starting board prep six weeks out – and JPM, the next raise, the big partner conversations

​

​

—

​

Sound like you? Shoot me an email at [xavier@eligo.bio] with:

• Your resume and your LinkedIn (and Twitter/site/whatever shows how you think).
• Why do you want to be a Chief of Staff – over a founder, BD, or VC path you’re probably also qualified for – and why at Eligo?
• About half this job is unglamorous & hands-on ops machinery. Tell me about something tedious you’ve owned and made run better – and whether you actually enjoyed it.
• One thing you’ve made that you’re unreasonably proud of the quality of. Attach it if you can.
• What’s one way I could have made this job posting better?

​

​

​

• I read every word myself. Raw AI output is an instant no - use the tools, but the thinking and the voice have to be yours.

• Keep it tight. How you triage this list tells me as much as the answers.

• Bonus question: the most over-engineered system in your own life – the spreadsheet, the automation, the ritual. I’m curious.