--- title: 'Chief of Staff at Featherless AI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/chief-of-staff-featherless-ai-san-francisco-15ydsmveqwsq' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-15' --- # Chief of Staff at Featherless AI - **Company:** Featherless AI - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-08-08 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-15 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/featherlessai/510ed476-0474-4900-8700-886541d374fc ## Job description ## About Us Featherless AI is a 3-year-old, venture-backed AI inference company ($27M raised); we’re building the inference stack for specialized intelligence. We're a team of ~40 people moving fast — and we need someone to help our CEO and leadership team move faster, with less breakage. ## About the Role We're hiring our first Chief of Staff to unlock our next phase of growth. Too much context lives in founder's heads. Roles and responsibilities are unclear, key projects lack singular owners / DRI and prioritization is always a challenge. Defining clear KPIs with owners and beating a drum around accountability is a key missing piece that needs an owner. This is the heart of the Chief of Staff role. This role exists to fix that. You'll convert founder instinct into process — without turning a 40-person company into a bureaucracy. This is not an executive-assistant role, and it's not an "AI adoption lead". You'll have real ownership over operational areas, not just support the CEO's calendar. We're early enough that this role will be defined significantly by what you're good at. We're looking for someone who's comfortable with that trade. ## What You'll Own - Operational admin that shouldn't sit with the CEO — vendor contracts and renewals, finance/ops logistics, and recruiting-process management (not sourcing, but the machinery: pipeline tracking, interview loops, offer logistics). - Cross-team coordination — you'll be the connective tissue between engineering, sales, and product when priorities drift out of alignment. You notice when teams aren't talking to each other before it becomes a fire. - The operating rhythm — as the company grows past 50, you'll help stand up the cadence (leadership meetings, action-item tracking, decision follow-through) that keeps priorities from living only in discord threads and the founder's memory. - Special projects — whatever is highest-priority and doesn't have a clear owner yet. This will shift month to month. ## What You'll Need - 5+ years in a high-ownership, fast-moving environment (startup operations, strategy consulting, banking, or similar) — strong judgment under ambiguity matters more than a specific pedigree. - Enough technical fluency to sit in engineering syncs and customer calls and follow what's being discussed. You don't need to have built ML systems, but you should be comfortable enough with how inference/model-serving products work to ask good questions and not need everything translated for you. - A track record of turning messy, undefined problems into a plan and driving it to done — with minimal hand-holding. - Strong written and verbal communication; you'll be relied on to represent the CEO's intent accurately in rooms the CEO isn't in. - Comfort with the fact that this role will change shape as the company scales. Some Chiefs of Staff grow into a functional VP role (Ops, BizOps, etc.); others stay in a generalist seat. We genuinely don't know yet which this will be — it depends on you and on where the company's needs go. ## About Featherless AI ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Featherless AI provides a serverless platform that offers API access to over 40,000 open-weight AI models from a single endpoint, designed for developers and enterprises. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series A) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States - **Founded**: 2023 - **Founders**: Eugene Cheah (CEO, Co-Founder) ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure / Serverless LLM Hosting - **Target customers**: B2B, serving developers, AI startups, and enterprises seeking scalable, cost-effective inference for open-source models. - **Mission or purpose**: To democratize access to all AI models by making them available for serverless inference, eliminating the need for server setup and complex infrastructure management. ## Products & Services - **Featherless API**: A unified API gateway providing instant access to over 40,000 open-weight models (e.g., DeepSeek, Llama, Mistral, Qwen, RWKV, GLM, Kimi) without setup or hosting. Pricing is flat-rate with unlimited tokens, starting at $25/month for up to 4 concurrent connections and 32K context, scaling to $200/month for higher tiers. Agent-specific plans ($100/month) include sandbox environments and persistent storage. The service emphasizes low latency, dependable uptime, and predictable costs. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed. - **Key Metric**: **Total Funding of $25M** — raised $5M in a Seed round (April 2025, led by Airbus Ventures) and $20M in a Series A round (announced ~May 2026, details still emerging). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Airbus Ventures, Kickstart Ventures, Panache Ventures, BMW i Ventures, AMD Ventures, and 11 other investors. The platform is built by researchers contributing to RWKV, a Linux Foundation project. - **Growth Signals**: The company is on a rapid growth trajectory, with headcount increasing 46.7% year-over-year to 14 employees. The website boasts over 2,100 "stars" for its Discord community. The company has a global presence, operating in 9 countries (including Singapore, Canada, Czechia, UK, Belgium, and Sweden). Website traffic is strong (73,508 monthly visits, growing +19.9% month-over-month), and there are 43 active job postings, a 65.4% quarterly increase in hiring. The Series A announcement signals significant investor confidence. ## Competitive Advantages - **Extensive Model Library & Zero-Friction Access**: A single API key provides access to the entire Hugging Face trending library, including models up to 229B parameters, with no need to manage infrastructure. - **Unlimited-Token, Flat-Rate Pricing**: A strong differentiator in the "per-token" pricing era, offering predictable costs suitable for scaling, with tiers from $25 to $200/month. - **Build for Reliability & Performance**: Architecture designed for real workloads with low latency and dependable uptime, utilizing proprietary GPU orchestration and model load-balancing. - **Open-Source Roots & Community**: Built by researchers contributing to RWKV (a Linux Foundation project), the company is deeply embedded in the open-source AI ecosystem, which fosters trust and community-driven development. ## Strategic Focus - **Scaling the Platform & Enterprise Adoption**: The Series A funding will be used to expand AI infrastructure and grow the platform. The company is actively hiring for senior roles like Founding Account Executives and Business Development Reps, signaling a shift toward aggressive go-to-market and enterprise sales. - **Expanding Global Presence**: With a distributed team across the US, Europe, and Asia, the company is building a global, remote-first workforce. - **Technical Innovation**: Focused on continuous improvement of inference performance and cost-efficiency through their GPU orchestration system and model load-balancing. ## Why Work Here - **High-Growth Stage**: As a Series A startup with strong investor backing, this is an opportunity to join a company experiencing rapid scaling, which offers significant career growth and impact potential. - **Impact & Ownership**: Employees are likely to have high autonomy and a direct impact on the company's trajectory, from building core infrastructure to driving revenue. - **Remote-First & Global Team**: Based on the distributed headcount across 9 countries (US, Singapore, Canada, UK, Belgium, etc.), the company is clearly remote-first, offering flexibility in where you work. Job postings reflect opportunities in the US and Europe (e.g., Paris, Berlin). - **Cutting-Edge Technical Challenge**: The core work involves solving complex problems in AI inference, GPU orchestration, and MLOps, making it a compelling place for engineers and researchers passionate about AI infrastructure. - **Culture & Values**: The company's deep ties to open-source AI communities and its "flat-rate, no-surprises" pricing philosophy likely translate into a transparent, developer-friendly internal culture. The small, highly-skilled team (14 people) suggests a close-knit, high-performing environment. ## Sources 1. [Featherless.ai Website](https://featherless.ai/) 2. [Featherless AI LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/feather-serverless-ai) 3. [Featherless AI Docs](https://featherless.ai/docs/overview) 4. [CB Insights Profile](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/recursal-ai) 5. [Featherless AI Jobs](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/featherlessai) ## Other roles at Featherless AI - [Founding Sales Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-sales-engineer-featherless-ai-us-bfj59k5ej0kf) — US &, Canada - [Founding Business Development Rep (AI Cloud US/CA)](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-business-development-rep-ai-cloud-us-ca-featherless-ai-us-973psexhmg2e) — US &, Canada - [Founding Account Executive (AI Cloud)](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-account-executive-ai-cloud-featherless-ai-us-wb7s9fy8rf34) — US &, Canada - [Content Marketer](https://feeny.ai/job/content-marketer-featherless-ai-europe-xnsbz1evvkbs) — Europe - [Business Development Rep (AI Cloud)](https://feeny.ai/job/business-development-rep-ai-cloud-featherless-ai-europe-hd5fymsqsh5h) — Europe - [AI Researcher — Training Optimization](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-researcher-training-optimization-featherless-ai-remote-hyc2csn67p2p) - [AI Researcher – Multilingual Data](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-researcher-multilingual-data-featherless-ai-remote-aj24t2jw442p) - [AI Researcher — AI Architecture Research](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-researcher-ai-architecture-research-featherless-ai-remote-dprg8203nt10) - [AI Researcher — Distillation](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-researcher-distillation-featherless-ai-remote-zxs1tx4mwq1f) - [AI Researcher — Inference Optimization](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-researcher-inference-optimization-featherless-ai-remote-5q35t4rfgjve)