Chief of Staff

Aonics; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Aonics is a Physical AI company building the operator layer for the field, enabling autonomous robots to inspect and maintain infrastructure. You will be the first operations hire, owning hiring, HR, compliance, and office systems, and you will build the processes from the ground up to scale the hardware business.

Based in San Francisco on-site, you will partner with the founders to create the systems that ensure smooth operations across payroll, vendor management, and field deployment, while

Qualifications

• 4+ years in operations, chief of staff, executive support, or similar generalist role at a startup.
• Track record of owning HR, admin, or compliance work end to end without an existing playbook.
• Excellent written communication and sound judgment handling confidential information.
• Highly organized under ambiguity; able to hold many small things at once without dropping them.
• Able to work independently on a small team with limited process.
• Based in San Francisco and on-site; this role does not work remotely.

Responsibilities

• Own hiring end to end: sourcing, scheduling, candidate experience, offers, and onboarding
• Own HR operations: payroll, benefits, PTO, contractor agreements, and employee records
• Own compliance: entity and state registrations, insurance, immigration filings, and customer-site requirements
• Run the office and field logistics: vendors, equipment, deployment travel, and team offsites
• Manage the founders’ calendars and priorities, and prepare board and investor materials
• Support GTM: keep the CRM current, prepare customer-facing collateral, and own marketing design across the website, decks, and social
• Build the internal systems and documentation the team runs on as we grow

Skills

Operations generalist

HR ownership

Executive support

Compliance management

Startup experience

On-site coordination

Communication

Tools

CRM systems

Figma

Job description

Aonics is a Physical AI company building the operator layer for the field: the intelligence that commands fleets of autonomous robots inspecting and maintaining physical infrastructure. We start with solar construction and maintenance, where hundreds of thousands of panels per site have made manual inspection structurally impossible. Our rovers run fully autonomously across utility-scale sites, carrying radiometric thermal, RGB, and LiDAR sensors that find component-level defects and tag them on the asset’s digital twin. Photon, our AI assistant, lets a single remote operator command the fleet and direct its work in natural language. We are a venture-backed team based in San Francisco, with robots deployed at customer sites across the US, Europe, and India.

The Role

You will run the company outside of engineering. As our first operations hire, you will own hiring, HR, compliance, and the office, and you will build the systems for each rather than inherit them. This is a high-ownership role working directly with the founders; the scope is everything that has to work for a hardware company to scale, and most of it does not exist yet.

Responsibilities

• Own hiring end to end: sourcing, scheduling, candidate experience, offers, and onboarding
• Own HR operations: payroll, benefits, PTO, contractor agreements, and employee records
• Own compliance: entity and state registrations, insurance, immigration filings, and customer-site requirements
• Run the office and field logistics: vendors, equipment, deployment travel, and team offsites
• Manage the founders’ calendars and priorities, and prepare board and investor materials
• Support GTM: keep the CRM current, prepare customer-facing collateral, and own marketing design across the website, decks, and social
• Build the internal systems and documentation the team runs on as we grow

Requirements

• 4+ years in operations, chief of staff, executive support, or a similar generalist role at a startup
• Track record of owning HR, admin, or compliance work end to end without an existing playbook
• Excellent written communication and sound judgment handling confidential information
• Highly organized under ambiguity; able to hold many small things at once without dropping them
• Able to work independently on a small team with limited process
• Based in San Francisco and on-site; this role does not work remotely

Preferred

• Experience at a hardware, robotics, or energy company
• Familiarity with US employment compliance and immigration filings such as H-1B, O-1, or TN
• GTM support experience: CRM hygiene, marketing operations, or sales enablement
• Design ability in Figma, Canva, or similar for decks, collateral, and social
• Experience supporting a founder or executive directly
• Exposure to finance operations: payroll, AP/AR, or expense management

Details