Chief of Staff

ABOUT NOUS Nous is a household AI agent. It takes over the bills and admin people don't have time for and acts for them: switching energy, buying insurance, cancelling forgotten subscriptions, managing the family calendar. Nearly 250,000 UK households have signed up, and another joins every minute. We think the real value of AI isn't writing amazing cover letters, it's doing useful things in the real world for real people. That's the hard part, and a brilliant product is only half of it. An energy switch takes weeks, so our agents run on long-running workflows, not a single chat turn. Cancelling a subscription means a browser agent handling the code Apple sends to your phone. Buying insurance meant getting our regulatory principal comfortable with an agent doing it end to end (a UK first), which comes down to knowing exactly when the LLM should hand over to rules because a mistake would cost someone real money. We're about 30 people running one agent across energy, broadband, mobile, insurance, mortgages and subscriptions (with more being added), each with its own suppliers, rules and ways of going wrong. With far more problems than people, a person or small team owns each one end to end, from spotting it in the data or a customer conversation to shipping the fix. And because the agent acts, you find out quickly whether the fix worked. Everyone builds here: a product engineer launched our subscription cancellation product within a couple of months of joining, and a PM rebuilt our WhatsApp agent. And it's working. We're growing more than 20x year on year, with a market-leading NPS above +80, and we manage well over half a billion pounds of household spending. We've raised more than $30M from Heartcore, Mosaic and a who's who of entrepreneurs who founded Monzo, GoCardless, lastminute.com and Onfido. But the real draw is the team - ask anyone here why they joined and you'll get some version of "to do great work with really smart people". The goal is household life that's simpler, cheaper and fairer, and most of that is still to build.   WHY WE'RE HIRING Nous runs on small teams with real ownership and barely any middle management. That's a big part of how about 30 of us became one of the UK's fastest-growing startups. It also means the work of joining everything up has been spread across the founders and leads, squeezed in around their day jobs. Plans, OKRs, closing the hires that matter, the big company pushes: everyone does a bit of it and nobody owns it. Last week showed what happens when someone does. We ran "crunch week": five days where most of the company dropped its normal work to relaunch Nous as a household agent. Twelve workstreams, one owner each, a short daily sync and a pre-mortem. In a week we rebuilt onboarding and the website, shipped new agent capabilities, and got legal, security and comms ready for launch. As one of the team said afterwards, when we cluster around a problem for a bit, we do loads of work. We want that pace more of the time, without a founder having to drop everything to run it. So we're hiring a Chief of Staff.   ABOUT THE ROLE You'll work directly with Greg (our CEO) and the founding team, and own how Nous runs day to day: the pace, planning and OKRs, and the big company pushes, plus overseeing hiring and helping land the hires that matter most. You'll sit in the management meeting and get the full picture, including the things that aren't public yet. And you'll have the authority to change how we work: cancel or reshape meetings, and move people and cut scope during a big push. You enjoy coordinating, but only because it gets things done faster. You'd rather get a decision made today than design a process for making decisions.   WHAT YOU'LL ACTUALLY DO - Set the pace. Spot what's stuck, work out why, and get it moving. Usually it's a decision nobody has made yet, so you get it made, or make it yourself. - Own planning and OKRs. Quarterly OKRs, the weekly management meeting, planning and offsites. Squads run pretty autonomously; you make sure they're working to the same priorities. Each of these should take up less of everyone's time with you running it, not more. - Own the scorecard. Keep the numbers behind our OKRs current, and say each week what's off track and why. You pull the data yourself (SQL, our BI tool, a spreadsheet) rather than chasing people for updates. - Run the big pushes. The next crunch week is yours: scope it with the leadership team, pick the owners, run it, and write up what we'd do differently next time. - Oversee hiring, and help close the hires that matter. Hiring managers run their own processes, and you won't be running ten of them. But you'll keep an eye on all of them, know where every search stands, and jump in where needed. Mostly that's closing the people we really want: working out what they care about and how to win them. Sometimes it's getting a recruiter excited about working with Nous, or unsticking a process that's gone quiet. - Represent Nous. You'll talk to recruiters and senior candidates from day one. Over time, and where it helps, you'll represent us to partners, suppliers and investors too. - Automate the boring bits. You'd rather build the Monday status digest with Claude than write it by hand every week. Anything you find yourself doing every week is a candidate for automating.   WHAT THIS ROLE ISN'T - An assistant. Diaries and inboxes are someone else's job. - A process role. If your first instinct is a new meeting, template or tracker, this probably won't suit you. With you here we should have fewer recurring meetings, not more. - A product role. Squads own what gets built, and strategy stays with the founders. You'll be in the room for both, and you make sure nobody's blocked. - A recruiter. You oversee hiring and step in where it matters; hiring managers still run their own processes. - A dumping ground for jobs nobody else wants. You'll pick up odd jobs, as everyone here does, but the bulk of the role is above.   WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE In your first 90 days: - The company runs noticeably better: decisions get made faster and fewer things stall. Ask the leads and they'd say so. - Something that had been stuck for weeks has shipped because you got involved. - You've helped close at least one hire we really wanted. - Next quarter's OKRs are set, and the scorecard is current every week. - At least one piece of weekly coordination (the OKR update, the status round-up) runs as an AI workflow you built, and nobody does it by hand any more. - We have fewer recurring meetings than when you joined. After a year: - You've led two or three company-wide pushes that shipped what they set out to. - The senior hires you helped close have said yes and are doing well. - Planning, OKRs and the weekly meetings run fine for a month without you. - Most of the routine coordination runs on workflows and tools you built, not on meetings.   ABOUT YOU You've got 4–7 years behind you (perhaps a little more if you've switched careers), probably a mix of a fast-growing startup and somewhere that taught you structure: consulting, BizOps or strategy and ops at a scale-up, a founder's office, or product work where you ran launches across teams. Maybe you've founded something. You coordinate because you're impatient. You notice the thing that's been stuck for a week, and you're the one who unsticks it. You're persuasive. You can work out what a candidate is really optimising for and how to close them, get a busy recruiter excited about Nous, and hold your own with senior people outside the company. You're comfortable with numbers. You can build a quick model, write a bit of SQL or find the right dashboard, and tell a real trend from noise. AI tooling is already how you work. Claude, Claude Code or similar is where you get things done, not something you tried once. You write clearly and quickly. Most of this job happens in writing: kick-off notes, weekly updates, closing emails. You tell people the truth, founders included, and you keep confidences. You'll see salaries, plans and people issues before anyone else does. You listen and you care, but you don't do politics. This role has more connective tissue with others than anyone else in the business, so by playing it straight and being an honest broker, you are also establishing an important norm. Low ego. Some of the job is unglamorous and you do it anyway. Bonus points: - You've closed hard candidates, or worked in recruiting, talent or BD. - You've run a company planning cycle, an offsite or a launch end to end. - You've worked somewhere regulated (energy, fintech, insurance). - You've automated a chunk of your own job and have something to show for it. - You are commercially astute or professionally experienced in a deep domain like law or accounting.   HOW YOU WILL GROW This might not be a forever role, and that's fine. You'll see more of how a fast-growing company works than almost anyone else here, which tends to open doors: running a new category as we expand, leading a function, or a commercial or operations role. Or the role grows with the company. Either way, we'll talk about it properly once you've been here a year.   REMUNERATION AND BENEFITS Compelling packages, including share options with life-changing upside. We've raised enough money to pay real salaries. We're building something great together and we all share in the upside. If we win, we win together. An environment where you can do your best work: - 🏢 A great office set up for lots of collaborative working. We already need more whiteboards - 💻 The equipment / setup / training you need to do your best work (and of course, AI subscriptions, including Claude Code Max tier) - 🤝 A high-context environment with lots of exposure to the big decisions - be in the room when it happens (literally) - 🏡 Flexibility around remote work. If you sometimes just need to get your head down, that's fine - ☕ Very good coffee - 🍽️ A well-stocked kitchen (featuring a wildly popular toastie maker) so you can always make yourself a breakfast or light lunch on the house - 🎉 Informal social every week, something bigger every month, plus a set-piece event in the summer and again at Christmas - we're not robots! - ✈ 33 days paid holidays (including bank holidays) - 💊 Health and dental cash plans, including an employee assistance programme - 🚴 Travel benefits, including the cycle-to-work scheme and season ticket loans Nous has an office-first culture. That means we encourage in-person working, and most people do work from the office in Farringdon most of the time. We do a lot of brainstorming, problem-solving and interaction within the team and presence makes this more effective. It also helps ensure people have good peripheral awareness and high context. But we are pragmatic not doctrinal about this, and recognise that, sometimes, certain types of work can be better done remotely. Most team members spend 3-4 days a week in the office on average. This role may naturally involve even more presence than that.   THE ENVIRONMENT Most importantly, this is a high-performance, high-agency and high-trust technical environment. Nous is intentionally lean and AI-native, not just in its product but as a company. Everyone is expected to use AI to its full potential, whether that's debugging a system, streamlining a workflow or improving how customers are served. Rather than building layers of middle management, we hire smart, high-agency people and give them real ownership. We're dedicated to fostering an inclusive and equitable workplace, and we actively welcome applications from individuals of all backgrounds. Every candidate is thoughtfully considered, without regard to race, religion, gender expression, disability or sexual orientation. If you don't tick every box but think you'd be great at this, ge…