Chief of Staff — Founder's Office
EduRankAI
Remote
Founder's Office
/
Founding leadership
Chief of Staff — Founder's Office
Founder's Office Strategy, Execution & Cross-functional Leverage
C-Level Full-Time On-site — Kolkata, West Bengal, India Permanent
Compensation
INR 50 LPA - 95 LPA base
Engagement
Full-Time
Permanent role. Full-time commitment. This is an on-site role at Kolkata. It is not remote and not hybrid.
Scope of role
Build the function from zero. Set the strategy. Own the outcome.
01 — The role
Why this role exists at EduRankAI
EduRankAI is a frontier AI and educational intelligence organization working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, research, talent development, and institutional transformation. The Chief of Staff sits inside the Founder's Office and is the highest-leverage non-functional role in the company. This is not an administrative role. It is the seat where strategy meets execution, where ambiguous problems get resolved into shippable plans, and where the founder's bandwidth is multiplied by someone who can be trusted with anything from a board memo to a hiring loop to a partner negotiation. The Chief of Staff has no formal team and unlimited scope. The right person for this role will look at the company in three months and see their fingerprint on at least six different functions — and at six months will have made themselves indispensable in ways that did not exist in the original job description. You'll thrive here if: you treat ambiguity as a resource, not a problem. You read drafts of other people's writing for sport. You can run a hiring loop in the morning, a partner call at lunch, and a market-sizing analysis in the afternoon — and you would rather do that than specialize. You understand that the highest-leverage role in a frontier company is the one nobody wrote a job spec for, and you can write that spec for yourself. You'll struggle here if: you measure your impact by org-chart depth. You need a clear remit handed to you. You think founders should outsource judgment. You write memos that nobody opens.
02 — The work
What you will own
- 01 Work directly with the Founder on strategic and organizational priorities — daily.
- 02 Drive execution of high-impact initiatives across multiple functions (research, AI platform, product, partnerships, hiring).
- 03 Conduct first-principles research and analysis on markets, technology, education, policy, partnerships, and organizational development.
- 04 Coordinate cross-functional projects and own delivery against deadlines that the rest of the company is watching.
- 05 Develop executive briefings, board memos, public communications, and decision-support materials — at a quality the Founder would publish under their own name.
- 06 Support institutional partnerships, stakeholder engagement, and strategic collaborations (governments, universities, donor agencies, research labs).
- 07 Lead leadership hiring loops alongside the People function — sourcing, calibration, panel design, closing.
- 08 Identify operational bottlenecks across the company and design scalable solutions you then drive to implementation.
- 09 Monitor progress against organizational goals and KPIs; surface drift early.
- 10 Hold confidential and mission-critical projects requiring discretion and sound judgment.
What we look for
Exceptional analytical and problem-solving abilityStrong written + verbal communication — writes well enough that the Founder would publish your drafts under their nameHigh ownership and execution capabilitySound judgment and professional maturity under pressureComfort operating in ambiguous and rapidly changing environmentsStrong stakeholder management — internal leadership AND external partners (government, university, donor, board)Intellectual curiosity that survives professional contextPolyglot fluency across at least three of: strategy, ops, finance, product, research, partnerships, hiring
04 — The bar
Who thrives here
- → You have founded a company, run a strategy or operations function at a serious startup, or held a Chief of Staff role at a frontier-AI or frontier-tech organization. Equivalent paths considered.
- → You can describe in writing a $50k+ decision you made (or strongly influenced) and what the second-order consequence was.
- → You write memos that other people open and forward. You can point at one.
- → You have run a hiring loop end-to-end (sourcing, calibration, panel, close) and you have hired at least two Senior or Staff-tier people who stayed past 18 months.
- → You can read a research paper, identify the load-bearing claim in 30 minutes, and brief a non-technical reader on it in 200 words.
- → You hold contradictions productively — you can argue for two opposing positions in writing and articulate where each is right.
- → You are comfortable being the most junior person in the room AND the most senior person on the call, often in the same hour.
How working time works at this level
No fixed daily or weekly hours. The office carries accountability for its remit, the availability that remit requires, and at least one full day of rest each week that you are expected to actually take.
Type
C-Level
Rest days
1 per week
Hours counted
No
Basis
Outcome and accountability
Measured by
The remit of the office, reviewed on the cycle agreed with the founder and the board. There is no attendance component and no hour count.
Where this stands legally
A role of this kind occupies a position of management. The working-hours provisions of the state Shops and Establishments Acts do not apply to persons in positions of management or in a confidential capacity, and under the labour codes such a role sits outside the definition of a worker. Stating a fixed hour count here would be neither accurate nor enforceable.
The full per-level model is published at Working Hours by Level.
05 — Hiring process
What to expect after you apply
- 01
Every application is read personally within five business days. We respond either way.
- 02
Role-specific. Time-boxed. Real problems we are actually working on, not invented puzzles.
- 03
Deep technical and values conversations with the team you would join. No trick questions. No panel ambushes.
- 04
If yes: digital offer letter, signed in-portal, transparent terms. If no: written feedback if you want it.
Before you start
What we will collect. What it costs. What we will not do with it.
We will collect
- Name, email, phone — Account + application updates. No marketing.
- Resume / portfolio link — Human review of your work.
- Date + place of birth — Identity verification only.
- Your written responses — Selection rubric. Read by humans.
- Government ID (later) — Anti-fraud at offer / interview stage. Not at signup.
- Sell your data
- Share with third-party recruiters
- Use for advertising
- Train models on it
- Send marketing email
EduRankAI is a small, independent organization building long-term capabilities in educational intelligence, advanced AI systems, and research infrastructure. We take no advertiser money, no donations with strings attached, and no investor pressure on hiring decisions. Applying is free, and every application is read by a human — recruitment, technical, academic and leadership teams. It buys us the right to be honest.
Full transparency policy Questions? Email us
Ready to apply?
We read every application personally. If you are the right person for this role — regardless of pedigree, background, or where you are based — you will hear back from us within five business days.
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