Chief of Staff, North America

Chief of Staff, North America

Reports to: Chris Berry, Managing Director, North America
Location: Vancouver, Canada, Hybrid
Compensation: CAD $120,000 to $180,000 base, plus equity, depending on experience

We’re up to something big.

Zen’s mission is to fully staff classrooms, so all children can thrive and educators avoid burnout. We do this by combining a product that schools and educators love with a hard-working, education-obsessed team.

Since launching in North America, we’ve been growing 4x year over year. That kind of growth creates hard, complex, urgent problems across the business. We’re now looking for a Chief of Staff, North America to work closely with our leadership team as we scale.

This is a role for someone energized by these challenges. Someone who can move quickly, create clarity from ambiguity, and turn rapid growth into better systems, sharper decisions, and stronger execution. The right person will be able to operate at both altitude and ground level, shaping strategy, doing sharp analysis, and getting deep into frontline processes when that is what the business needs.

Why Zen

There is a staffing crisis in education. Too many teachers are leaving the profession, not enough are coming in, and school leaders are being forced to manage daily staffing gaps with limited budgets and limited visibility.

That’s why Zen exists.

We’re building a better way for schools to find, vet, and manage temporary educators. Our platform gives school leaders more control, more transparency, and better access to great educators, while helping reduce wasted spend in education.

Zen is now a 500+ person team operating across the UK, US, and Canada. We’re venture backed, well funded, and building toward a national rollout across North America.

We’re also a certified B Corporation, which matters to us. It reflects the company we are trying to build: one that grows quickly, performs exceptionally, and stays deeply accountable to schools, educators, children, and the communities we serve.

We’re trying to do really well by doing good.

Why this role exists

We’re scaling fast, and the work is outrunning the org chart.

You’ll work directly with the North American leadership team, owning the operating cadence, driving key cross-functional projects, and jumping on problems that do not yet have a clear owner.

It is a broad remit by design. The business needs someone who can move fast across functions, bring structure to ambiguity, and make important work happen.

You’ll report to Chris Berry, Managing Director, North America, who made a similar move from consulting into startup revenue and operations. That means you’ll get close coaching from someone who understands the transition and will push you to grow quickly.

What you’ll do

No two days will be the same. You might be working on things like:

The pace will be high. The work will be hands-on. The ownership will be real.

What we’re looking for

We’re looking for someone with a demonstrated record of exceptional performance.

This is likely a fit for someone with 5 to 10 years of experience
, including time in consulting, investing, high-growth startups, strategy, operations, revenue, marketplaces, or another demanding generalist environment.

We care less about the exact path you have taken than your slope, judgment, and evidence that you have operated well in demanding environments. You do not need to have been a Chief of Staff before, but you do need to have shown that you can take on hard problems, create clarity and momentum, and drive real outcomes.

Traits that usually correlate with success in this role: