Chief of Staff, Technical

The role

Gridsight is looking for a Technical Chief of Staff to work directly with - and report to - our CEO and CPO on the product and technical priorities that matter most to the company. This role is based in Sydney, Australia.

This is not a coordination or project-administration role. It is a hands-on company-building role for a technically credible operator who can move between strategy, product, engineering and execution - bringing clarity to ambiguous problems, helping teams make better decisions and driving critical work through to shipped outcomes.

Your mandate

Drive the highest-leverage product and technical priorities

• Own a small number of the company’s most important product and technical initiatives at any time, from an unclear problem to a measurable outcome.
• Work across product strategy, technical discovery, architecture and trade-offs, AI, data, platform, infrastructure and whatever becomes highest leverage as the business evolves.
• Structure problems from first principles, form hypotheses, get close to the code, data, customer and system, recommend a direction and execute.
• Step into critical work without an obvious owner, solve it, then establish the ownership and operating mechanism needed to make it repeatable.

Turn strategy into shipped outcomes

• Translate CEO and CPO priorities into clear product and technical plans, decisions, owners, milestones and dependencies.
• Align product, engineering, design, data and commercial teams around the outcome, the trade-offs and the path to delivery.
• Surface product and technical risk early, unblock cross-functional delivery and ensure decisions happen at the right level.
• Go deep enough to test assumptions, follow the work through delivery and verify that what ships creates customer and business value.
• Turn successful one-off solutions into reusable mechanisms without creating bureaucracy.

Create leverage for the CEO and CPO

• Synthesize complex product and technical context into crisp, decision-ready recommendations.
• Pressure-test assumptions, identify the missing question and bring independent judgement without ego.
• Take full ownership of important work that does not require the CEO or CPO, creating more time for the things only they can do.
• Represent the CEO and CPO selectively in internal and external discussions, maintaining context and alignment across stakeholders.
• Build the trust and context to operate with minimal oversight while knowing when a decision or risk must be escalated.

Strengthen the product and technical operating system

• Build lightweight planning, review, decision and metrics cadences that increase speed and accountability.
• Improve how product bets, technical investments and trade-offs are made, communicated and revisited.
• Connect customer and market insight to the roadmap and technical priorities, and translate technical reality back into company strategy.
• Create clear feedback loops across quality, speed, reliability, adoption and customer outcomes.
• Use automation, AI and modern tooling pragmatically to increase leverage across product and engineering.

What success looks like

• The company’s highest-leverage product and technical priorities move faster and ship measurable outcomes.
• The CEO and CPO have materially more leverage and make better, faster decisions with clearer technical and product context.
• Teams are aligned on outcomes; dependencies, risks, decisions and owners are visible and actively managed.
• Important work no longer stalls between functions or falls into gaps in ownership.
• Customer and market insight shape product choices, while technical reality shapes company strategy.
• The product and technical operating system increases velocity without adding unnecessary process.

What will make you phenomenal

• You have a strong technical foundation and can reason credibly about software systems, architecture, data, AI, quality, security and reliability.
• You have strong product judgement: you obsess over the problem and the outcome, not the output.
• You see no walls. If something matters, you find a path through functional boundaries, hierarchy and uncertainty.
• You are a first-principles problem solver who seeks truth, challenges assumptions and builds answers from the ground up.
• You drive and effect change. You own outcomes rather than producing recommendations from the sidelines.
• You move fluently between strategy and execution—from an executive decision or technical trade-off to the analysis, prototype, document or follow-up required to make it real.
• You are willing and able to get hands-on with code, data, prototypes and AI tools when that is the fastest way to learn or unblock progress.
• You communicate technical complexity clearly, exercise sound judgement and earn trust with engineers, executives, customers and partners.
• Experience in software engineering, technical product, technical program leadership or a founder’s office in a high-growth startup is useful; evidence of exceptional ownership and problem solving matters more than a conventional pedigree.