This is a 5 day in office position in our downtown San Francisco office.
About UsPreference Model is building automated ML research engineering.
Existing frontier models are brittle when applied to real-world ML tasks. The present bottleneck is the lack of high-quality RL training environments. Our first step is to build RL environments that reflect real-world complexity, with diverse tasks and robust reward functions.
Our founding team has previous experience on Anthropic’s data team building data infrastructure, and datasets behind Claude. We are partnering with leading AI labs to push AI closer to achieving its transformative potential.
About the RoleWe are hiring a Chief of Staff to own how Preference Model runs internally, so the founders spend their time on customers, fundraising, and strategy. You will own finance operations, vendors, events, the office, and team knowledge, and you will support HR and Recruiting.
You will report to a co-founder and be our go-to operations individual.
Vendor Management:
Own vendor management end to end.
Build one list showing owner, cost, and renewal date, and renegotiate or consolidate where we are overpaying
Build Automations:
Put every recurring bill on autopay, and run a monthly expense review that costs founders under 30 minutes, with anomalies flagged before anyone has to ask
Finance & Compliance:
Own tax filings and accountant requests end to end with our external accountants, so deadlines never turn into a fire
Own SoC 2 compliance and other compliance/security related
Onboarding & People:
Partner with HR Consultant and Founding Recruiter to rebuild onboarding so a new hire has accounts, equipment, and context inside their first week, and consolidate Notion into one current source of truth they can search
Grow into the hiring loop. Within 6 months, take candidate intro chats when needed and run culture interviews
General Operations:
Run a regular retro cadence with tracked follow-ups
Run the office day to day, and drive the space, lease, and equipment decisions to completion
Special Projects:
Team Building & Events:
Own offsites and team events end to end, from planning and budget through logistics and follow-through
Conference Planning:
Plan and run our presence at AI conferences, from booth and sponsorship decisions through candidate and customer touchpoints and post-event follow-up, representing us on the floor yourself
Whatever we discover your strengths to be, we would love for you to expand in that direction. There is room for this role to grow and expand in scope.
You have owned operations at a company under 100 people, and you built the systems rather than inheriting them
You are comfortable on the finance side of operations.
You notice details others miss, catch the double charge, the auto-renewal nobody noticed, and the seat count nobody updated, and then you build the checklist so it cannot happen twice.
You make the people around you faster. You take on unglamorous work without being asked, you defuse tension rather than escalating it, and new hires learn how we work by watching you
You over-communicate by default and keep it short. Frequent updates and nobody has to chase you for status
You represent the culture of the company.
You prioritize ruthlessly and adapt fast.
Nice to Have:
Familiarity with the modern operations stack (spend tools like Brex or Ramp, an HRIS like Rippling or Gusto, Notion, or close equivalents).
Experience planning conferences, offsites, or field events against a real budget
Experience in a candidate-facing role, even informally
Experience as the first operations hire at a fast-growing startup
Competitive cash and equity compensation
Ownership and autonomy in a fast moving startup environment
Opportunity to work with top Machine Learning Engineers
Health, Vision, Dental, benefits
401K match
Lunch provided daily, and a weekly snack order
Skills Required
- Owned operations at a company under 100 people and built systems from scratch
- Comfortable handling finance operations, tax filings, and working with external accountants
- Experience owning or managing vendor relationships end-to-end
- Strong attention to detail and ability to build processes to prevent errors (billing, renewals, seat counts)
- Experience running office operations, lease/equipment decisions, and daily on-site management
- Ability to improve onboarding and consolidate searchable team knowledge (Notion or equivalent)
- Excellent written and verbal communication; habit of over-communicating concisely
- Ability to defuse tension, take on unglamorous tasks, prioritize ruthlessly, and adapt quickly
- Familiarity with modern ops stack (spend tools, HRIS, Notion)
- Experience planning conferences, offsites, or field events against a budget
- Experience in a candidate-facing role or running culture interviews
- Experience as the first operations hire at a fast-growing startup
What We Do
Preference Model is building automated ML research engineering and the next generation of training data to power the future of AI. They focus on creating high-quality reinforcement learning (RL) environments that reflect real-world complexity, featuring diverse tasks and robust reward functions. This effort aims to solve the bottleneck of brittle frontier models when applied to real-world ML research and engineering tasks.
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