Head of Guest Experience

Cloud9

$110K — $130K *
Hospitality & Recreation
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Proven experience building guest operations or service systems from the ground up.
  • Ability to define and track metrics that drive performance and guest satisfaction.
  • Hands-on experience with AI technologies and implementing them in operational workflows.
  • Demonstrated skills in hiring, coaching, and managing team performance against high standards.
  • Strong comfort with ambiguity and willingness to create standard operating procedures on the fly.
  • Confidence to present and defend ideas directly to the CEO.
  • Fluent in English, both written and spoken.

Responsibilities

  • Establish the standard for five-star guest response and service.
  • Create and implement SLAs, escalation paths, and QA scorecards.
  • Develop systems and tools for tracking key performance metrics.
  • Recruit and manage a high-performing team tailored to luxury service standards.
  • Protect company margins by reducing refund and comp costs through improved service delivery.
  • Integrate AI solutions to streamline operations and enhance guest interactions.
  • Oversee daily operations with a focus on measurable outcomes and continuous improvement.

Benefits

  • Opportunity to build and own the guest experience function from scratch.
  • Work in a fast-paced, meritocratic environment where performance is rewarded.
  • Be part of an AI-native company revolutionizing luxury short-term rentals.
  • Collaborate closely with a small, dedicated team focused on high standards and efficiency.
Full Job Description
What this is

Cloud9 runs 60+ luxury units across 13 buildings, scaling past 100.

Guests expect five-star.

Right now, guest experience has no owner but the CEO, running it at partial capacity between forty other fires.

Response is slow. Missed calls fall through. The same problems get re-solved every week.

There is no SLA, no QA, no dashboard.

We are not looking for someone to help with that.

We are looking for someone to own it and never hand it back.

You will build the guest-experience function from zero:
  • The standard
  • The SLAs
  • The escalation logic
  • The QA scorecard
  • The coaching cadence
  • Eventually, the team

You will wire the tracking so the whole thing runs on numbers, not feelings.

You will use AI as the engine - triage, first-draft replies, SLA tracking, missed-call alerts - so a small team delivers luxury-grade response across the whole portfolio.

Day one there is no machine to inherit. There is a mess and a mandate.

If that excites you, keep reading. If it scares you, this is not your role.

What you'll own

The standard. What five-star response looks like at Cloud9, defined and encoded, not left to whoever is on shift.

The numbers. Median first response under 5 minutes. 100% of missed calls called back inside 15. You wire the tracking and you live on the dashboard.

The systems. SLAs, escalation trees, QA scorecard. Built from scratch, documented, run by the team.

The team. You hire to your bar, you coach on a cadence, and you let people go when they don't hold the line.

The margin. Refund and comp dollars are a number you protect. Speed and quality can't be bought by giving away margin.

The AI stack. You build with LLMs, KB, automated responses, triage, alerts, and you own what ships.
What success looks like

Day 30. Instrumentation live. The current mess is measured, not guessed at: response times, callback rate, escalations, refund dollars all have a baseline.

Day 90. SLAs defined and tracking live. Missed-call callback at 100%. Escalations to the CEO near zero. Guest experience is off the CEO's desk.

Day 180. QA scorecard running. Weekly coaching cadence live. First hire made to your bar.

Month 12. Full team in place. Response times held under SLA. Review-score floor hit. Refund dollars inside guardrail.

The CEO has not answered a guest ticket in six months.

What you'll need
  1. A guest-ops or service system you personally built from zero. SLA, escalation, QA, something. Bring the artifact and the number it moved. The build matters more than the résumé.
  2. A metric you defined, wired the tracking for, and ran a function against. Show us the dashboard.
  3. Real AI in your daily flow. LLMs building your knowledge base and automating your responses, with prompts you can show. Not "I've used ChatGPT."
  4. Management reps: people you've hired, coached, and let go, and a bar you held them to.
  5. Comfort building the SOP instead of waiting for one. Ambiguity is the job.
  6. The spine to disagree with the CEO to his face, with a reason.
  7. Fluent English, written and spoken.


Who this is not for

Read this part carefully. This role has been open before and we paused it on purpose. We are done hiring the wrong shape.
  • Hospitality-corporate lifers who ran someone else's playbook and never built one. If your track record is "operated within an existing system," this is not it.
  • People who manage by vibes. If you can't name a metric you defined and moved, keep scrolling.
  • "My team delivered" people. We need what you built and owned, not credit you shared on an org chart.
  • Anyone who treats AI as beneath the role or someone else's job. This is an AI-native seat.
  • People who need a finished SOP to move. There is no SOP. You are writing it.
  • Anyone who thinks front-line guest reality is beneath a "Head of." It isn't, and you'll be in it.

Warm and lovely and credentialed is not the job. Built-it-from-nothing-and-ran-it-on-numbers is the job.

What's real about Cloud9 right now
  • Guest experience is unbuilt. You are not inheriting a machine, you are building one from a mess.
  • This seat has burned two finalists on the same wrong profile. We know exactly what we don't want now, and the bar is high.
  • The CEO has been the hidden owner of CS. Your job is to take that from him permanently. That means early days are heavy and hands-on.
  • We move at speed and cut mediocre work fast.
  • Distributed team. LatAm-primary for this seat, with the field/turnover side run out of Chicago.
  • Before any final interview, there is a paid case study. We test the work before we test the room.


About Cloud9

Cloud9 is an AI-native luxury short-term rental operator in Chicago. We manage 60+ units across 13 Class-A residential buildings. We're expanding to 7+ U.S. cities. We exist to reinvent hospitality with AI-driven execution.

Our core values:
  • Meritocracy - Performance is public. Measurable. Rewarded.
  • Execution - Doers win. Deliver fast. Adjust faster.
  • Radical Feedback - Real-time corrections. No politics.
  • Championship Team - Only A-players stay.

Why Pentice

If you want to own a number, move fast, and build with AI instead of around it, this is the place. Small team, real leverage, high standards, and the people who build the systems get to run them as we scale city by city. If you want a comfortable seat where effort counts more than outcomes, we are not it.

How we hire

Apply, about five minutes. Watch a short, honest video about how we work and answer a written questionnaire - both count. A 30-minute call. A working session on a real problem, with AI use expected and visible. Two reference calls. Then an offer. Every candidate gets an answer either way.

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