Chief of Staff

Lever, Inc.; Bengaluru; Hybrid; INR 2,500,000 - 4,000,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible PTO

Unlimited AI usage

Stocked pantry

Job summary

Gushwork, Bengaluru-based, is seeking a hands-on leader to partner with the Cofounders to drive priorities, cadence, and execution across functions.

You will own 2–3 high-impact cross‑functional projects end‑to‑end, turning ambiguous problems into measurable outcomes, and build core systems for goals, hiring, performance, and review processes.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of work experience in a startup or fast‑growing environment.
• Experience leading a team directly for at least 1 year with hiring/firing.
• Comfort working with multiple functions and minimal documentation.
• Proven ability to own outcomes end-to-end and drive execution.
• Strong memo-writing and concise communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Run the company's operating cadence with leaders across functions.
• Own 2–3 cross‑functional projects end-to-end to completion.
• Represent the Cofounders to propagate priorities and recommendations.
• Directly manage a small operations team and scale as needed.
• Build foundational systems for goals, hiring, and performance reviews.
• Handle unglamorous tasks and ensure follow‑through on key metrics.
• Provide candid, data‑driven input to the CEO and execute decisions.

Skills

Leadership

Cross-functional

Project management

Operations strategy

Data-driven

Communication

Job description

Gushwork is building an Agent Operating System for small and mid-sized businesses around the world. It is a modern business software where AI agents and humans work together. Business owners and leaders set the goals. They decide what each agent is allowed to do. Then they review the metric each agent delivers. We started with an SEO agent. It owns one metric: organic leads. Once it ranks pages and brings in leads, it reports them back to the customer. We are now expanding into a Paid Ads agent and a Developer agent, each owning a metric the business cares about. Our customers sell high-value goods and services and have fewer than 200 employees. Most of them are in industries that are not digitally native: manufacturers, industrial distributors, commercial services. They do not buy AI. They buy outcomes. Our job is to make agents reliable enough that a business owner can trust them with a number. We are a team of about 90 people based in Bengaluru, backed by Lightspeed and SIG. If you want to want to help us build reliable agents that runs real businesses, we're excited to meet you!

About Role

• Partner closely with the Cofounders to drive company priorities, operating cadence, and execution across functions.
• Own 2–3 high-impact cross-functional projects end-to-end, turning ambiguous problems into measurable outcomes.
• Build and strengthen core company systems across goals, hiring, performance, metrics, and operational processes.
• Act as a force multiplier for leadership—bringing structure to execution, challenging decisions with data, and ensuring priorities move to completion.

What You Will Do

• Run the company's operating cadence: the weekly meetings with team leaders across functions, monthly business reviews and quarterly planning. You decide what each one covers, you prepare it, and you make sure decisions taken in it actually happen.
• Own two to three cross‑functional projects at a time and take them to a finished result. These will be the projects that sit between functions and would otherwise stall.
• Act for the Cofounders with leaders across the company. You will carry his priorities into their teams, bring their problems back to him with a recommendation, and decide what he does not need to see.
• Manage a small team directly, starting with the people who run company operations, and grow it as the work grows.
• Build the systems the company does not have yet: how we set goals, how we hire, how we review performance, how we find a struggling manager before their team leaves.
• Take the unglamorous work yourself when nobody else should: the board deck nobody owns, the metrics email that stopped going out, the vendor contract about to auto‑renew.
• Tell the CEO when he is wrong, with the facts and an alternative, and then execute his call if he still disagrees.

What You Have

Must have:

• You have 7 or more years of work experience.
• You have worked in a startup. You know what it is like when there is no process, no precedent and no one to hand a problem to.
• You have managed a team directly, with people reporting to you, for at least a year. You have hired people and you have let people go. Project leadership and dotted‑line teams do not count.
• You are comfortable working with people across every function, from engineers to salespeople to the operations floor, most of your day. This role is mostly conversations, not documents.
• You have built something from nothing that other people still run: a function, a process, a business.
• You have owned an outcome end to end and can say what it was before and after you owned it.
• You have done long stretches of operational, repetitive work and stayed in it.
• You have disagreed with a cofounder or a manager on something that mattered and can tell us how it went.
• You write clearly and briefly. A busy person can act on your memo in two minutes.

Preferred:

• Preferred candidates from Tier 1 institutes, particularly like BITS, IIT's, IIM's OR ISB.
• Prior experience in Strategy & Business Operations, or Founder’s Office roles is preferred.
• You have worked at a US SaaS or AI company, or sold into US customers.
• You have founded or co‑founded a company, or were on a founding team through at least one hard year.
• You have worked with a CEO, founder or business head closely enough to have made decisions on their behalf.

Why You’ll Love Us

• You’ll be part of an early team at a fast‑growing company, with a lot of impact
• You’ll get to work with really smart and helpful people
• We constantly adopt the latest technologies and stay close to the latest ai innovations
• Opportunity to influence the direction of the product and engineering culture
• Flexible PTO policy
• Unlimited AI usage
• Plus cool swag, a stocked pantry, and other benefits