---
title: 'Chief of Staff, CEO at DepthFirst'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/chief-of-staff-ceo-depthfirst-san-francisco-mvtyx5wjnqtx'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-11'
---

# Chief of Staff, CEO at DepthFirst

- **Company:** DepthFirst
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-07-18
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/depthfirst/c6f1a7af-48bc-47ff-9f86-9f666a47afe8

## Job description

## About depthfirst

We believe that software is the foundation of modern civilization. Yet vulnerabilities threaten its integrity, security, and resilience. We are on a mission to secure the world's software. depthfirst is building intelligence to detect and remediate critical software vulnerabilities. We are training and scaling security AI agents to discover zero-day vulnerabilities across large customer codebases and popular open source software. Our founding team brings deep expertise in data, infrastructure, security and AI, with leaders from DeepMind, Databricks, Square, and Faire. We're looking for thoughtful, driven people excited to work at the intersection of AI, Security, and Infrastructure.

## About This Role

As Chief of Staff to the CEO, you'll operate at the center of the company working directly with the CEO and executive team as the company scales through one of the most important growth phases of the company. You'll act as a leverage point for the CEO, turning strategy into execution, running the initiatives that don't have a natural home in one function, owning the hardest cross-functional problems, driving the highest-stakes decisions, and ensuring leadership operates with clarity and speed. Some days you'll be driving company-wide initiatives. Other days you'll be preparing board materials, leading strategic analyses, solving organizational bottlenecks, or jumping into customer conversations. This is a high-trust, high-visibility role for someone who wants broad exposure to how a fast-growing AI security company is actually built and run.

You're excited about this role because you will…

- Act as a trusted advisor and extension of the CEO, turning priorities into structured plans (OKRs, board materials, investor updates, decision memos), and proactively close gaps, see around corners, and resolve problems before they reach the CEO's desk
- Lead high-priority, cross-functional projects that don't sit neatly in one department such as competitive analysis, AI automation efforts, and ad-hoc analyses
- Own the company's operating cadence: leadership meetings, all-hands, planning cycles and keep cross-functional initiatives on track
- Develop integrated views of product economics, market dynamics, and business performance that no single function owns, driving alignment and decision making that span Product, Eng, Finance, and GTM
- Act as an extension of the CEO in communication with functional leads, customers, board members, and investors

## Qualifications

- 5+ years of experience in a mix of strategy consulting, banking/PE, or an operating role (GM, biz ops, or functional lead) at a scaling startup
- Bachelor's Degree from a top university
- Direct startup experience is strongly preferred
- Comfort navigating ambiguity and building credibility with functional peers
- Speaks the language of Eng, Finance, and GTM well enough that each trusts your judgment as an extension of their own
- Demonstrated ability to work through unstructured problems and drive them to outcomes independently
- Strong written and verbal communication
- Ability to move fluidly between strategic thinking and tactical execution in the same day
- High judgment and discretion, given regular access to sensitive company information

Bonus Points For

- Experience at a high-growth startup or early-stage company
- Hands-on experience with AI tools, agents, or automation to increase analytical and operational velocity
- Familiarity with security, infrastructure, or developer tooling markets

## What We Offer

- Competitive salary with meaningful equity
- Health, vision, and dental insurance
- 401k
- Office lunch and dinner (SF office)
- Ownership and significant room to grow as the company scales

depthfirst is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law.

To all recruitment agencies: depthfirst does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to depthfirst employees. depthfirst is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes and will not pay fees to any third-party agency or company that does not have a signed agreement with the Company.

## About DepthFirst

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Autonomous security platform that uses AI to continuously find, validate, and fix exploitable vulnerabilities across code, infrastructure, dependencies, and runtime environments.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B, $80M total funding)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: Not publicly available
- **Founders**: Qasim Mithani, Daniele Perito, Andrea Michi

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Cybersecurity (AI-native autonomous security)
- **Target customers**: B2B, Enterprise (developers, security teams, CISOs)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "Secure the world’s most important software."

## Products & Services
- **Agentic Pentesting**: Autonomous penetration testing that runs dynamic exploits against running applications to confirm real attack paths.
- **Supply Chain Security**: Traces risk through full dependency trees and surfaces only vulnerabilities with a real execution path.
- **Secrets & Sensitive Data**: Detects and validates credentials across codebase, CI/CD pipelines, and runtime environments.
- **Code Security**: Finds vulnerabilities by tracing business logic, data flows, and cross-service interactions across the codebase.
- **Dependency Firewall**: Detects and blocks malicious behavior before it spreads in the environment.
- **Fix & Verify**: Generates merge-ready pull requests for every confirmed vulnerability, then replays the attack post-fix to ensure the vulnerability is truly resolved.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metric**: Total funding $80M (Series B announced March 2026, led by Meritech Capital Partners; Series A with 12 investors)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Meritech Capital Partners (lead Series B), plus 12 Series A investors. Backed by leading investors in AI, security, and software.
- **Growth Signals**: 33 employees (366.7% YoY growth); 11 active job postings; claims 8x more true positives and 95% fewer false positives vs. leading tools; 90% of fixes accepted by developers; $5M in platform credits offered to open source maintainers via the Open Defense Initiative.

## Competitive Advantages
- **AI-native context-aware reasoning** – The platform understands code, business logic, and infrastructure to find complex vulnerabilities (including business logic flaws and chained exploits) that siloed tools miss.
- **Extremely low false positives and high fix acceptance** – 95% false positive reduction and 90% developer-accepted fixes create trust and productivity.
- **Founding team** – Built security at Cash App/Faire, infrastructure at AWS/Databricks, and AI research at Google DeepMind (contributions to Gemini, AlphaDev, Nature publications).
- **Continuous autonomous verification** – After each fix, the same attack is replayed in the running application; vulnerabilities are only closed when exploitation fails, not when code changes.

## Strategic Focus
- Advancing AI agents for security through reinforcement learning (training vulnerability discovery agents, e.g., dfs-mini1 model).
- Scaling enterprise adoption and expanding the Open Defense Initiative to secure widely deployed open source projects.
- Building a research-driven applied AI lab focused on software security.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Positioned as an "applied AI lab" at the frontier of security and AI research. Team members come from top companies like Databricks, Meta, Google DeepMind, Faire, and Notion.
- **Work policy**: On-site in San Francisco (multiple offices, including 250 Montgomery St and 1 Sutter St).
- **Open roles**: 11 positions across Engineering (Backend, Product, Security, Research), Sales (Account Executive, SDR, Solutions Engineer), Product Design, and Business Operations.
- **Notable perks**: Not explicitly detailed but typical for well-funded Series B startups; equity, competitive compensation, and the chance to work on cutting-edge autonomous security in a rapidly growing team.

## Sources
1. [depthfirst.com](https://depthfirst.com/)
2. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/depthfirst](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/depthfirst)
3. [depthfirst.com/about](https://depthfirst.com/about)
4. [linkedin.com/company/depthfirst](https://www.linkedin.com/company/depthfirst)
5. [builtin.com/company/depthfirst](https://builtin.com/company/depthfirst)

## Other roles at DepthFirst

- [Recruiting Coordinator](https://feeny.ai/job/recruiting-coordinator-depthfirst-san-francisco-5cyt00c1955d) — San Francisco, CA
- [Technical Account Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-account-manager-depthfirst-san-francisco-q9z1adhzcasb) — San Francisco, CA
- [Analytics & GTM Operations Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/analytics-gtm-operations-lead-depthfirst-san-francisco-m2bpyhgeyqyh) — San Francisco, CA
- [Recruiter](https://feeny.ai/job/recruiter-depthfirst-san-francisco-nctmw46zw084) — San Francisco, CA
- [Product Marketing Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/product-marketing-lead-depthfirst-san-francisco-hyzqtxyagt3g) — San Francisco, CA
- [Product Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/product-manager-depthfirst-san-francisco-mhm9q7m349mm) — San Francisco, CA
- [Sales Development Representative](https://feeny.ai/job/sales-development-representative-depthfirst-san-francisco-2bmyvnhjc5t1) — San Francisco, CA
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- [Solutions Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-engineer-depthfirst-san-francisco-67h8ve7dk5qx) — San Francisco, CA
- [Forward-Deployed Security Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-security-engineer-depthfirst-san-francisco-byz7vsnkc69t) — San Francisco, CA