Sovereign-scale infrastructure, at lightspeed. Backed by Space Capital.
About the role
Own the founders' office: the operating cadence, priorities, meetings, decisions, and the follow-through that makes them real. Own People and HR: recruiting operations, onboarding, benefits, payroll, policies, and the culture as we scale.
What they're looking for
- You've owned real operational outcomes end-to-end - as an early-stage Chief of Staff or operator, or from management consulting, banking, the military, or another environment that demands ownership under pressure. Slope matters more to us than pedigree
- Ruthlessly organized, high-output, and low-ego. You close loops without being chased
- Comfortable with ambiguity and breadth - you can go from an HR question to a financial model to a vendor contract in the same afternoon and do all three well
- An excellent communicator, written and verbal, trusted with sensitive information and complete discretion
- A bias to action. You'd rather ship an imperfect fix today than a perfect one next month
- You want to build the function and then lead it, not stay a coordinator forever
More about this role
FIRST ORDER EFFECTS
Chief of Staff
Infrastructure for the Autonomous Era · First in. First up.
On-site · Austin, TX
A company moving this fast generates a mountain of work that is not the mission: hiring, finance, legal, operations, compliance. Someone has to own all of it so the founders and the engineers do not. That someone is you. You take it off their plate, you run it, and you build the teams that will run it after you. This is not a support role. It is leverage, and it is yours.
Who We Are
First Order Effects (FOE) is building America's Infrastructure Prime for the robotic era. Autonomous ships, drones, and robots are rewriting how the world moves, fights, and builds - but none of them work without infrastructure to power them, connect them, and launch and recover them. That's what we build.
We've Built Cutting Edge Systems at Legendary Companies
Our team comes from SpaceX, Anduril, Saronic, Lockheed Skunk Works, Forterra, and Fuse Energy. Before founding FOE, we built satellite ground stations that closed a national comms gap in days, deployed multi-megawatt power systems at commercial speed, and shipped autonomous surface vessels into Navy fleet production. We've built...
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