Chief of Staff

**Here's the tl;dr**:

- ** We are on a mission** to make programming biology easy. We provide biologists with the software, machine learning & services to discover, design and optimise enzymes and their cell-factories to ultimately produce almost anything.
- We're an **experienced team**. We have built many successful products before and we've raised EUR 5.5m from top tier investors
- We're focused on building the **best possible team culture**. We're distributed across two locations, do almost everything async and are super flexible about when and where we work.
- We offer **top of the market** salary, a generous equity stake in the company and a wide range of benefits from health and wellbeing, financial, to training and career progression opportunities.

**This is Cradle**:
Cradle helps teams to engineer proteins with fewer, more successful experiments. We use generative machine learning models, accessible through user-friendly software interfaces, to help engineer protein properties such as stability, expression, activity, binding affinity and specificity. We are bridge builders who bring together the best of machine learning, synthetic biology, developer tools, and user experience design. Our mission is to enable a world where most of the products around us can be easily made and degraded biologically using a cell-factory instead of (petro-)chemicals, plants or animal agriculture.

**Your Role**:
As our Chief of Staff, you’ll be the right hand of our founding team and Stef van Grieken (our CEO). This crucial role is a mixture of everything: you are simultaneously a Head of Operations, Growth, People, Strategy and Finance. Next to this, you’ll do ‘all the stuff nobody else is doing’ (i.e., standing with your feet in the mud and shoveling).

Your priority is to ensure our teams can perform at their best and focus on delivering a best in class product. This means both the cool stuff (like teaming up with Stef on strategic projects and fundraising), as well as the ‘not sexy’ stuff (like HR related tasks or organizing an off-site trip). In an early stage startup, it is crucial everything gets done.

You are a “jack of all trades” (M/F). You have an entrepreneurial spirit and even considered starting your own business. You are a self-starter and eager to “do whatever it takes”. In a team which thinks big and rapidly expands, you make sure we can keep growing.

There are no limits with this role and we expect this person to be a future leader at Cradle as we scale.

**Responsibilities**
- ** Strategy**: Run quarterly and annual goal setting processes; Run special projects such as: customer research to identify new markets, go-to-market approaches, figure out global expansion locations.
- ** Investor Relations**: Assist the CEO in future fundraising, as well as preparing relevant reports & meetings for our current investors; Build financial models to inform strategic decisions.
- ** Growth**: Play a role in winning over new customers, and ensure they stay happy once they’ve signed.
- ** Operations**: Set up the processes, systems, and monitoring to execute on our projects; Translate the strategy into a drumbeat lived by everyone; Write the Playbook to guide how we work.
- ** People**: Work with the team to hire, recruit and onboard new team members; Ensure a safe workplace in both our offices and lab; Ensure compliance with all relevant rules and regulations; Take responsibility for HR and finance administration; Build tools and structures that guarantee smooth People operations.
- ** Shoveling mud**:too much to mention. This role is only a fit if you are ready to roll up your sleeves and do whatever it takes :)

**Need to have**
- You have 8-10 years of experience and worked in a high-growth environment before.
- You have consistently performed in the top percentile of whatever environment you’ve been in, whether in business, education, sport, or any other dream you pursued.
- You are entrepreneurial and want to be part of building a business. You want to rise faster than would be possible in any ‘normal’ career and you’re happy to roll up your sleeves and do whatever’s required.
- You have infinite proof points of having a relentless drive and being a jack of all trades.
- You have the gravitas to network with and sell to senior leadership (eg. VP Research of an important pharma company) and can either speak their language or have the ability to learn it fast.
- You’re an outstanding communicator; verbal, written, and when presenting.

**Nice to have**
- Prior experience as a founder, COO, or other executive role in a VC-backed start-up
- Prior experience in (top tier) strategy consulting
- Prior experience in (top tier) biotech (or technical background in sciences and not afraid to read a college textbook to get up to speed)

**Learn More & Apply**:
Send along links that best showcase the relevant things you've built and done. Ask your favourite person to include a letter