What to ExpectWe are looking for a COO or a VP Operations who can function as a true company operator: owning execution across engineering, field operations, manufacturing, recruiting, finance, customer delivery, and internal systems. This person will lead from the front, run an extremely tight operating cadence, and make sure the hundreds of things required to keep projects moving actually get done.
This is a cofounder-level role at a very early company. The upside is meaningful equity, extreme ownership, and the chance to help build one of the defining hard-tech companies of the next decade. The downside is real: long hours, high intensity, ambiguity, and a team that expects leaders to earn authority through competence.
Key Responsibilities- Own company-wide execution across engineering, operations, deployments, hiring, finance, procurement, legal coordination, and customer delivery.
- Build and run the operating system of the company: weekly cadence, project plans, dashboards, accountability loops, and decision-making processes.
- Manage and motivate a high-intensity technical team while earning credibility with engineers, field operators, and founders.
- Drive field deployments from planning through completion, ensuring projects do not slip because of logistics, staffing, materials, permitting, vendors, or customer coordination.
- Work directly with the CEO to support fundraising, board communication, strategic planning, and company priorities.
- Support GTM and customer execution across PE firms, developers, infrastructure owners, government agencies, USACE, and other defense-adjacent customers.
- Recruit, evaluate, and help close exceptional talent across technical, operational, and commercial roles.
- Thrive at the pace and intensity of early-stage startup life, including long days, 6-day workweeks, and field hours when needed.
Requirements- Exceptional operational judgment, intensity, and ownership.
- Experience leading strategy, operations, deployment, product, or company-building functions at a high-growth deep tech, robotics, aerospace, defense, infrastructure, or hardware startup.
- Ability to manage technical teams and make high-quality decisions around complex engineering and field operations, even without being the deepest technical expert in the room.
- Strong comfort with customers, investors, board members, vendors, and government / defense stakeholders.
- Willingness to work on-site in Berkeley, CA.
- U.S. work authorization. We cannot sponsor H-1B visas at this time.
Preferred Skills & Experience- VP / Director / Head of Strategy or Operations at a flagship deep tech company.
- COO, CPO, CTO, VP Ops, or GM experience at a Series B or later hardware startup with a serious public presence.
- Experience at companies such as SpaceX, Anduril, Astranis, Armada, Zipline, Tesla, or similarly intense robotics / hard-tech environments.
- Experience selling or deploying products that are hard to sell and hard to build.
- Military, defense, infrastructure, disaster recovery, government, or field deployment GTM experience.
- Founder or founder-level operating experience. Important to have seen 0->1.
- Strong finance, strategic planning, and fundraising fluency.
Ideal Archetype- A high-aptitude operator 3-15 years into their career who has already scaled unusually fast. They need to be the smartest person at our company. Wicked, cunning, fluent in the dark arts, blurry in pictures.
- Someone who could plausibly be a founder, but who chooses our rocket ship over starting from zero.
- Has built or run something real in robotics, aerospace, defense, infrastructure, construction tech, or complex hardware.
- Can walk into a messy early-stage company, create order, raise the bar, and make everyone more intense and effective.
- Has enough technical taste to manage engineers, enough commercial judgment to help sell, and enough operational force to keep the whole machine moving.
- Comes from a flagship deep tech company, an Elon-founded company, or a serious venture-backed hardware company. We are optimizing for aptitude, intensity, and company pedigree over title.
