Chief of Staff
Build the Company Defining AI for Real Estate
Location: London (based at Balderton Capital), Dubai or San Francisco
Reports to: Founder & CEO
About Smart Bricks
Smart Bricks is building the future of AI for real estate.
Every year, trillions of dollars are invested across residential, commercial and alternative real estate using fragmented systems, disconnected data and manual workflows. We're building an AI-native platform that helps investors, developers, lenders, governments and Fortune 500 companies source opportunities, underwrite investments, perform due diligence and manage portfolios using AI.
Alongside our software platform, we're building an Applied AI Lab that works directly with some of the world's largest real estate organisations to redesign complex workflows using AI. Every customer engagement generates institutional knowledge. Every deployment strengthens the platform. Every improvement compounds across every future customer.
We've raised over $5 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and are backed by some of the world's leading technology ecosystems, including Techstars, Google, NVIDIA and Microsoft through their AI and startup programmes.
Our Founder is a Forbes 30 Under 30 entrepreneur and an Andreessen Horowitz Scout, helping identify and back the next generation of AI founders globally.
We're building our founding leadership team across London, Dubai and San Francisco. Our London team is based at Balderton Capital, one of Europe's leading venture capital firms, giving us the opportunity to work alongside some of Europe's most ambitious founders, investors and technology companies.
This is a chance to join at the earliest stage of building what we believe will be one of the world's leading Applied AI companies for real estate.
Why exceptional people join us
🚀 Raised $5M+, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)
🤝 Backed by Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft and Techstars
🏢 London office based at Balderton Capital
🌍 Building across London, Dubai and San Francisco
🏆 Founder recognised as Forbes 30 Under 30 and an Andreessen Horowitz Scout
🤖 Building Applied AI with leading institutional real estate organisations
Why this role?
This isn't a traditional Chief of Staff role. You won't manage calendars, produce endless slide decks or operate on the edge of the business.
You'll work directly with the Founder across every major priority in the company, from strategy and fundraising to hiring, product, enterprise customers, partnerships and international expansion. One week you might help recruit a world-class Engineering Lead. The next you could be preparing board materials, redesigning the operating cadence, launching a partnership or supporting a major enterprise deployment. Your job isn't to own one function, it's to increase the effectiveness of every function. You'll be one of the few people with visibility across the entire business, solving the highest-leverage problems as Smart Bricks scales. The best Chiefs of Staff create leverage, and that's exactly what you'll do.
What You'll Build
Company strategy and execution. Design how Smart Bricks operates, so that as the company grows it gets faster, not slower:
- Annual and quarterly planning and company OKRs
- Executive operating cadence and leadership reviews
- Business performance reporting and cross-functional planning
- Decision-making frameworks
Goal: create clarity, remove friction, increase execution.
Executive partnership. Become the Founder's closest operating partner, maximising their effectiveness by making sure their time goes to the highest-impact work. You'll help prepare for:
- Board meetings, investor updates and fundraising
- Executive hiring and leadership reviews
- Enterprise customer meetings and strategic partnerships
You'll often represent the Founder internally and occasionally externally.
Strategic initiatives. Lead the company's highest-priority projects, the ones that don't naturally belong to any single function:
- International expansion and scaling the Applied AI Lab
- Enterprise customer deployments and product launches
- Executive hiring and organisational redesign
- Strategic partnerships, internal AI transformation and fundraising readiness
Build a high-performance organisation. Partner with every executive leader to strengthen planning, prioritisation, accountability, communication, hiring and organisational design. Your job is to make Product, Engineering, Applied AI, Commercial and Operations operate as one company, not independent teams. As Smart Bricks grows, you make sure the complexity doesn't.
What Success Looks Like
Within your first 12 months you'll have:
- Built the company's operating cadence: planning, OKRs and business reviews running without you chasing them.
- Made the Founder measurably more effective, with their time shifted onto strategy, customers and fundraising.
- Delivered multiple company-wide strategic initiatives end to end.
- Built strong recruiting and onboarding processes for senior leaders.
- Established clear company goals and an accountability framework everyone can see.
- Created operational discipline without creating bureaucracy.
Success won't be measured by how many meetings you attend. It'll be measured by how much more effective the company becomes because you joined.
Who we're looking for
We're looking for exceptional operators who create clarity where others see complexity. Titles matter less than impact, we're interested in people who've repeatedly been trusted with a company's hardest problems.
Specifically, you'll likely have:
- 7 to 12 years across one or more of: Chief of Staff, Founder's Office, Business Operations, Strategy & Operations, General Management, top-tier strategy consulting, investment banking, VC/PE, or founder / startup operator.
- Operated inside a fast-scaling venture-backed startup or scaleup through a period of rapid growth (ideally Seed through Series B/C), and seen first-hand how companies break and how to fix them.
- Worked directly with founders or CEOs on their highest-leverage problems.
- Built operational systems from first principles: planning cycles, OKRs, board papers and investor updates.
- Led company-wide strategic initiatives and recruited senior leadership.
- Strong commercial and analytical judgement: you can read a P&L, pressure-test a model and make decisions with imperfect information.
- A degree from a strong institution, ideally with a track record of top academic and professional performance.
You're equally comfortable sitting in a board meeting, building an operating model, writing a strategy document, recruiting an executive, analysing business performance, leading a cross-functional initiative and rolling up your sleeves to execute. You move naturally between strategic thinking and hands-on execution, you don't wait for permission, and you create momentum.
Experience in AI, enterprise software or real estate is a bonus, not a requirement. We're far more interested in exceptional operators than industry specialists.
Compensation & Benefits
We believe exceptional people should share in the value they create. You'll receive a highly competitive salary and a meaningful equity package, private healthcare, flexible working, an annual learning and conference budget, access to the latest AI models and developer tooling, and a seat in our London office at Balderton Capital, alongside one of Europe's leading VC ecosystems.
How We Work
We hold ourselves to exceptionally high standards. We think like owners, move quickly without compromising quality, solve problems proactively, communicate with clarity, sweat the details, stay relentlessly curious and bias towards action. We optimise for execution and learning, not bureaucracy and hierarchy, and we care more about outcomes than job titles.
Why Join
We move insanely fast, with real rigour and standards, to build the company that redefines how AI works for real assets.
You'll work directly with the Founder and executive team to shape company strategy, recruit world-class leaders, and solve the highest-leverage problems across product, engineering, Applied AI, commercial, fundraising, hiring and international expansion. The systems you build will determine how Smart Bricks scales over the coming years.
If you're the type to get out of bed to build a company that defines an industry, in this generation and the ones after, Smart Bricks is the place for you. We'd love to talk.