Chief of Staff

Socket.dev; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 125,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Cash and equity

Ownership

ML engineers

Healthcare benefits

401K match

Lunch & snacks

Job summary

Socket.dev is seeking a Chief of Staff to own internal operations from finance, vendors, to office management in our downtown San Francisco HQ. You will partner with founders to optimize time for customers, fundraising, and strategy.

You will implement scalable processes, lead onboarding, drive compliance, and coordinate events and conference presence. The role offers ownership, fast-moving environment, and the chance to shape our operations as the company scales.

Qualifications

• Experience running operations for startups under 100 people.
• Ability to own finance operations and vendor management end-to-end.
• Strong detail-orientation and process-building.
• Excellent written and verbal communication.
• Proactive problem-solver who can scale a growing team.

Responsibilities

• Own vendor management end-to-end, with cost analysis and renewal tracking.
• Build automations to reduce recurring bills and monthly expense review time.
• Oversee finance filings, compliance, and security-related tasks.
• Rebuild onboarding and collaborate with HR to accelerate new-hire setup.
• Manage office operations, space planning, and equipment.
• Plan team events and conference participation from planning to follow-up.

Skills

Operations leadership

Finance literacy

Attention to detail

Communication

People management

Prioritization

Tools

Notion

Spending tools

Job description

This is a 5 day in office position in our downtown San Francisco office.

About Us

Preference Model is building automated ML research engineering.

Existing frontier models are brittle when applied to real-world ML tasks. The present bottleneck is the lack of high-quality RL training environments. Our first step is to build RL environments that reflect real-world complexity, with diverse tasks and robust reward functions.

Our founding team has previous experience on Anthropic's data team building data infrastructure, and datasets behind Claude. We are partnering with leading AI labs to push AI closer to achieving its transformative potential.

About the Role

We are hiring a Chief of Staff to own how Preference Model runs internally, so the founders spend their time on customers, fundraising, and strategy. You will own finance operations, vendors, events, the office, and team knowledge, and you will support HR and Recruiting.

You will report to a co-founder and be our go-to operations individual.

What You Will Do

• Vendor Management:
  • Own vendor management end to end.
  • Build one list showing owner, cost, and renewal date, and renegotiate or consolidate where we are overpaying
• Build Automations:
  • Put every recurring bill on autopay, and run a monthly expense review that costs founders under 30 minutes, with anomalies flagged before anyone has to ask
• Finance & Compliance:
  • Own tax filings and accountant requests end to end with our external accountants, so deadlines never turn into a fire
  • Own SoC 2 compliance and other compliance/security related
• Onboarding & People:
  • Partner with HR Consultant and Founding Recruiter to rebuild onboarding so a new hire has accounts, equipment, and context inside their first week, and consolidate Notion into one current source of truth they can search
  • Grow into the hiring loop. Within 6 months, take candidate intro chats when needed and run culture interviews
• General Operations:
  • Run a regular retro cadence with tracked follow-ups
  • Run the office day to day, and drive the space, lease, and equipment decisions to completion
• Special Projects:
  • Team Building & Events:
    • Own offsites and team events end to end, from planning and budget through logistics and follow-through
  • Conference Planning:
    • Plan and run our presence at AI conferences, from booth and sponsorship decisions through candidate and customer touchpoints and post-event follow-up, representing us on the floor yourself
  • Whatever we discover your strengths to be, we would love for you to expand in that direction. There is room for this role to grow and expand in scope.

What We are Looking For

• You have owned operations at a company under 100 people, and you built the systems rather than inheriting them
• You are comfortable on the finance side of operations.
• You notice details others miss, catch the double charge, the auto-renewal nobody noticed, and the seat count nobody updated, and then you build the checklist so it cannot happen twice.
• You make the people around you faster. You take on unglamorous work without being asked, you defuse tension rather than escalating it, and new hires learn how we work by watching you
• You over-communicate by default and keep it short. Frequent updates and nobody has to chase you for status
• You represent the culture of the company.
• You prioritize ruthlessly and adapt fast.

Nice to Have:

• Familiarity with the modern operations stack (spend tools like Brex or Ramp, an HRIS like Rippling or Gusto, Notion, or close equivalents).
• Experience planning conferences, offsites, or field events against a real budget
• Experience in a candidate-facing role, even informally
• Experience as the first operations hire at a fast-growing startup

What We Offer:

• Competitive cash and equity compensation
• Ownership and autonomy in a fast moving startup environment
• Opportunity to work with top Machine Learning Engineers
• Health, Vision, Dental, benefits
• 401K match
• Lunch provided daily, and a weekly snack order