Chief of Staff

Full-time. In-person at our Presidio office in San Francisco.

About The Electric Plant Co.

The Electric Plant Co. is building the world’s first plant intelligence platform: technology that decodes the electrical signals plants are already producing and turns them into actionable, hyper-local insight about the living world. We’re founded by two repeat founders, one a fifth-generation plantsman, the other a neuroscientist, and we’re venture-backed. We’re a small, fast-moving team in San Francisco working at the intersection of botany, neuroscience, AI, and climate, with our first commercial deployment on the horizon.

The Role

We’re hiring a Chief of Staff to make the business side of the company run while our CEO does the thinking work only he can do. Our technical org, research, engineering, and deployment, is getting real operational leadership. The business side isn’t there yet: finance and people are fractional, and BD, marketing, and comms don’t exist as functions. You’ll close that gap.

This is two jobs. First, you’ll quarterback business operations: coordinating our fractional finance and people leads, our controller, and a growing layer of AI agents that handle volume work, so that finance, people ops, admin, vendors, and the operational hygiene of the company run as one accountable system instead of several disconnected lanes. Second, until our first deployment lands and BD becomes a real function, you’ll hold everything around BD, marketing, and comms except the message itself, which our CEO authors: inbound response, pipeline hygiene, customer follow-through, investor updates, and PR and event logistics.

You’ll report directly to our CEO. You won’t own strategy, and you won’t manage the technical org. What you’ll own is everything that has to happen for this company to run well while it’s still inventing its own shape, and the trust to hand off cleanly once a gap you’re filling becomes someone else’s full-time job.

What You’ll Own

• Business operations coordination. Run finance, people ops, tax, admin, benefits, vendors, and office operations as one system, working across our fractional team, our controller, and our AI agent layer.

• AI-agent leverage. Be the most sophisticated, demanding user of our internal AI operating system for business ops: specify what it should handle, evaluate whether it’s delivering, and push volume work onto it.

• Customer and pipeline support. Own inbound triage, pipeline hygiene, and prospective-customer follow-through, including scheduling and prepping customer visits.

• Investor and external communications logistics. Ship investor updates on a regular cadence and handle PR and event logistics.

• Sales collateral. Turn existing sales material into shipped, professional customer-facing packages.

What We’re Looking For

• Experience running business operations end to end at a small company where those functions were fractional or partially covered, not full in-house teams.

• A track record coordinating people who don’t report to you, fractional or in-house, and getting them to move on a deadline.

• Comfortable producing customer- or investor-facing material in someone else’s voice or a company’s institutional voice, without needing personal credit.

• Real experience as a sophisticated user of AI agents or automation for operational work: specifying, evaluating, and catching failure, not necessarily building the system yourself.

• Experience owning inbound triage, pipeline hygiene, or customer-facing logistics in a pre-sales or early commercial context.

• Comfortable holding a founder or senior leader accountable to a deadline while keeping the relationship strong.

• A history of taking on operational gaps across multiple functions rather than one specialist track, because variety is genuinely what draws you.

• Vendor-, fractional-, and customer-facing day-to-day presence and credibility.

Strong plus

• Prior experience at an early-stage (pre-Series A/seed) startup, ideally a hardware, field-services, or physical-operations-heavy business.

• Background in or genuine curiosity about plant science, agriculture, or horticulture.

What This Is Not

This role isn’t for someone who wants to author strategy, manage a technical team, or build a permanent empire around one function. You’ll do everything and own nothing permanently, either falling in love with a gap and growing into that function, or staying the person who makes the company work between hires. Both are real, good outcomes here, and the right person hears that as freedom, not a lack of a “real” job. If you need fingerprints on your work, or you’re looking for a bridge to doing strategy, this isn’t it. If you want to be the reason a fast-moving, still-inventing-itself company actually runs, we’d like to talk.

Compensation & logistics

• Salary range is $153k - $183k per year, with meaningful early-stage equity

• Standard benefits

• Full-time, in-person at our Presidio office in San Francisco

• Start date: ASAP

We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.