Chief of Staff to the CEO

Cartesia

Full-time

San Francisco, CA

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About Cartesia

Our mission is to build the next generation of AI: ubiquitous, interactive intelligence that runs wherever you are. Today, not even the best models can continuously process and reason over a year-long stream of audio, video and text—1B text tokens, 10B audio tokens and 1T video tokens—let alone do this on-device.

We're pioneering the model architectures that will make this possible. Our founding team met as PhDs at the Stanford AI Lab, where they invented State Space Models or SSMs, a new primitive for training efficient, large-scale foundation models. Our team combines deep expertise in model innovation and systems engineering paired with a design-minded product engineering team to build and ship cutting edge models and experiences.

We're funded by leading investors like Index, Kleiner Perkins, and Lightspeed along with Factory, Conviction, A Star, General Catalyst, SV Angel, Databricks and others. We're fortunate to have the support of many amazing advisors, and 90+ angels across many industries, including the world's foremost experts in AI.

We’re looking for a Chief of Staff to be a force multiplier for our CEO. This is a highly execution-focused role that requires strong attention to detail and the ability to create structure in a fast-paced environment.

What You'll Do

Act as our CEO’s strategic partner and right hand. Ensure time, focus, and energy are directed towards the most critical, high leverage priorities.
Streamline and operationalize business processes. Prepare agendas, synthesize discussions, drive follow-ups, and guarantee decisions get translated into action across the org.
Manage high-stakes cross-functional initiatives. Drive special projects across sales, customer success, security / compliance, and growth partnerships
Optimize Executive Effectiveness: Own and manage the CEO’s calendar with a ruthless focus on maximizing efficiency and organizational alignment with key priorities.
Embed with strategic customers to define voice AI applications, influence product strategy, and shape long term AI adoption.
Evangelize Founder Vision. Drive internal all-hands meetings, shape external narratives, and ensure our story resonates with employees, customers, investors, and partners.
Anticipate Business Needs. Understand blind spots, mitigate risks, identify areas for business process streamlining, and keeping our executive team always 2 steps ahead.
Continuously raise the bar. Help us define our culture, scale key business processes, and codify what excellence looks like across the company.

What You'll Bring

2+ years of professional work experience:
1-2 years at a top-tier management consulting firm, investment bank, or private equity / venture capital firm.
1+ years building early stage business functions at high growth venture-backed startups (Series A - C)
Strategic DNA: You are comfortable with framing narratives, building data models, and running point on cross functional initiatives.
High-Impact Ownership Mindset: You are comfortable operating with limited guidance / resources and thrive when given full ownership over workstreams. You know how to bring order to a high growth environment where there are multiple competing tasks.
Exceptional Problem-Solving Skills: You excel at taking complex, undefined problems 0 to 1, structuring solutions, and driving decisions with data.
Excitement for Our Mission: You are genuinely passionate about the future of voice AI and ready to evangelize our mission.
Adaptability Under Pressure: You are excellent at context-switching, balancing urgent workstreams, ad hoc requests, and chipping away at long term projects.
Exceptional Communicator: You have an uncanny ability to distill complex insights into crisp messaging for executives, internal teams, and external stakeholders.
Technical Curiosity & Depth: You’re a natural learner that can ramp up quickly on technical documentation, model APIs, and AI knowledge.

Nice-to-Haves

Technical degree (Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, etc.)
Prior Chief of Staff, Business Operations, or Founder experience
Strong understanding of AI / ML, Voice AI, or developer-focused platforms
Track record scaling operations in Series A–C startups.
Experience working with technical teams

Our culture

🏢 We’re an in-person team based out of San Francisco. We love being in the office, hanging out together and learning from each other everyday.

🚢 We ship fast. All of our work is novel and cutting edge, and execution speed is paramount. We have a high bar, and we don’t sacrifice quality and design along the way.

🤝 We support each other. We have an open and inclusive culture that’s focused on giving everyone the resources they need to succeed.