Chief Of Staff – Cloud

Chief Of Staff – Performance Cloud

40 hours per week (9am to 6pm, including one hour of unpaid break)

Hybrid Role – 3 Days per Week in the Office and 2 Days per Week working from home

Guildford office – 2000, Cathedral Square, Cathedral Hill, Guildford GU2 7YL
, United Kingdom

Occasional - leadership offsites, data centre and customer visits (~10%)

Isaac Douglas, General Manager, Performance Cloud

is the dedicated infrastructure and bare metal business within Nexcess. We run global infrastructure for customers who need the performance, control and reliability that commodity cloud doesn't give them.

The business unit has more good opportunities than it has capacity to execute against, and the GM's time is the binding constraint. This role removes that constraint. The Chief of Staff runs the operating machinery of the BU - the cadence, the metrics, the follow-through - and personally leads the strategic work that matters most but has no natural owner. Critically, you also own the honest conversation about what we are not doing.

This is not an assistant role, and it is not a project coordinator role. It is a senior seat with real judgement, real influence and a direct line to every decision the BU makes.

• Run the leadership operating rhythm: weekly leadership meeting, monthly business review, quarterly planning and the annual cycle. You set the agenda, frame the decisions, capture the outcomes and chase the actions.
• Own goal setting and performance tracking. Run the KPI process end to end - from target-setting through to the dashboard the leadership team actually uses. Make sure the numbers are trusted and the same in every room. The set spans commercial performance - revenue, pipeline, margin, churn and win rate - alongside operational measures, and each quarter’s plan is honest about the capacity available to deliver it.
• Close the loop on decisions. Maintain a single view of what was decided, by whom, by when - and elevate early when something is drifting, rather than reporting it after the fact.
• Prepare the GM and the BU for parent-company reporting. Board and Nexcess leadership updates, QBRs and ad hoc requests - you build the narrative and the supporting analysis.
• Improve the machinery. Kill meetings that don't earn their place, simplify reporting, and reduce the internal overhead the leadership team carries.
• Maintain the single view of committed priorities. Keep an unambiguous, current picture of what the BU has committed to, who owns it and what capacity it consumes. When a new opportunity or request enters the system, you frame the trade-off - what it displaces, what it costs, what slips - and force the decision rather than letting the work quietly absorb it.

• Lead cross-functional initiatives end to end - market entry, product or pricing moves, go-to-market changes, cost and margin programmes, systems or process overhauls. You are accountable for the outcome, not just the plan.
• Build the analysis behind big decisions. Market and competitive assessments, build/buy/partner cases, capacity and investment models, business cases with real numbers and honest assumptions.
• Act as the GM's thinking partner. Pressure-test strategy, surface second-order consequences, and be willing to disagree in private before the decision is made.
• Incubate what doesn't have an owner yet. Stand up new motions or functions, run them until they work, then hand them to a permanent owner and move on.
• Run the front door for new opportunities. Triage what arrives - customer requests, partner approaches, internal…