Chief of Staff

Aonics is a Physical AI company building the operator layer for the field: the intelligence that commands fleets of autonomous robots inspecting and maintaining physical infrastructure. We start with solar construction and maintenance, where hundreds of thousands of panels per site have made manual inspection structurally impossible. Our rovers run fully autonomously across utility-scale sites, carrying radiometric thermal, RGB, and LiDAR sensors that find component-level defects and tag them on the asset’s digital twin.

Photon, our AI assistant, lets a single remote operator command the fleet and direct its work in natural language. We are a venture-backed team based in San Francisco, with robots deployed at customer sites across the US, Europe, and India.

You will run the company outside of engineering. As our first operations hire, you will own hiring, HR, compliance, and the office, and you will build the systems for each rather than inherit them. This is a high-ownership role working directly with the founders; the scope is everything that has to work for a hardware company to scale, and most of it does not exist yet.

• Own hiring end to end: sourcing, scheduling, candidate experience, offers, and onboarding
• Own HR operations: payroll, benefits, PTO, contractor agreements, and employee records
• Own compliance: entity and state registrations, insurance, immigration filings, and customer-site requirements
• Run the office and field logistics: vendors, equipment, deployment travel, and team offsites
• Manage the founders’ calendars and priorities, and prepare board and investor materials
• Support GTM: keep the CRM current, prepare customer-facing collateral, and own marketing design across the website, decks, and social
• Build the internal systems and documentation the team runs on as we grow

• 4+ years in operations, chief of staff, executive support, or a similar generalist role at a startup
• Track record of owning HR, admin, or compliance work end to end without an existing playbook
• Excellent written communication and sound judgment handling confidential information
• Highly organized under ambiguity; able to hold many small things at once without dropping them
• Able to work independently on a small team with limited process
• Based in San Francisco and on-site; this role does not work remotely

• Experience at a hardware, robotics, or energy company
• Familiarity with US employment compliance and immigration filings such as H-1B, O-1, or TN
• GTM support experience: CRM hygiene, marketing operations, or sales enablement
• Design ability in Figma, Canva, or similar for decks, collateral, and social
• Experience supporting a founder or executive directly
• Exposure to finance operations: payroll, AP/AR, or expense management