“I’m Winston Wolfe. I solve problems.”
The Wolf, Pulp Fiction
Every fast-moving startup has a moment where the founder looks up from the real work and realizes they’ve spent the whole week on purchase orders, vendor emails, calendar invites and paperwork.
That’s when they call The Wolf.
This is a Chief of Staff / Operations Manager seat at a fast-growing deep-tech startup in Santa Clara. The founder is building something technically hard and genuinely new. Your job is to make sure operations never slow that down. You arrive, you take the problem off their plate, and it stays solved.
What lands on your desk
- Procurement and logistics. Ordering hardware and supplies, running vendors, shipping and receiving, and tracking every piece of kit. When something breaks, you handle the RMA.
- Finance ops. AP/AR, budgets, purchase orders and bookkeeping, working with the outside accountant, insurance broker and lawyers.
- Recruiting and people. Hiring end to end, from scheduling to signed offer to onboarding. You also keep visa paperwork moving with immigration counsel.
- Founder support. Calendar, travel and logistics, and the occasional errand nobody else will do.
- Investor relations. Keeping the data room current, preparing materials and following up after meetings.
- Depending on your background. Setting up and testing compute, managing devices and accounts, and tightening security around valuable IP.
What good looks like in 90 days
The founder hasn’t touched an order, a vendor thread or an RMA in weeks. Every piece of hardware is tracked. New hires walk in to a working laptop, live accounts and finished paperwork. And when something does slip, you caught it before anyone else noticed.
What you bring
- You’ve owned a recruiting process or a set of vendor relationships end to end. Not supported. Owned.
- 1 to 3 years in operations, finance or a similar seat at an early-stage startup, a hardware company or a research lab.
- Hands-on financial operations: AP/AR, budgeting and procurement.
- Scrappy, with real early-stage experience. You’ve worked somewhere small enough that if you didn’t do it, it didn’t happen.
- You run with ambiguity. Hand you a vague problem and you come back with the right answer, executed, without anyone checking in.
- Technical literacy in AI and semiconductors. You won’t be designing anything, but you can hold a proper conversation with engineers about chips, compute and inference.
- A STEM, finance or business degree is a plus.
- Bonus: sysadmin, IT or security experience, or fundraising and investor relations experience.
Probably not the right fit if
- Your operations experience has only been inside large corporates.
- You’re a sales, AE or GTM strategist at heart.
- Your recent years have mostly been independent consulting rather than embedded in one team.
The details
- Santa Clara, CA. On-site five days a week. This is an in-the-room role.
- $160K base + equity. You choose your mix: take less cash and you get more equity.
- A sign-on bonus is on the table for the right person.
- US citizens and Green Card holders only. No visa sponsorship.
- A valid driver’s license is required. Some of the work involves driving.
- Immediate start.
How to apply
No cover letter. Send your resume with short answers to these:
- Tell us about something operational you owned end to end, such as a hiring process, a vendor relationship or a procurement pipeline, and what nearly went wrong.
- Who were your last five managers, and what would each score you out of 10 if we called them?
- Why an early-stage startup right now, rather than somewhere bigger and safer?
- Which task on the list above would you least enjoy, and why?
- If money were no object, what would you be doing?
- Quick confirm: five days on-site in Santa Clara, US citizen or Green Card holder, and a valid driver’s license?
Pretty please, with sugar on top. Apply.
