Chief of Staff

Navi is scaling across flight schools, airlines, and the U.S. Air Force simultaneously. The Chief of Staff will be the connective tissue between founders, engineers, pilots, schools, and defense partners, ensuring that nothing slips through the cracks as we scale from scrappy startup to aviation’s new standard.

About the role

This is not an administrative role. It is an operating role.

You are the founder's integrator and force multiplier. You take intent and turn it into execution across every front Navi is fighting on, and you do it with taste, speed, and zero ego.

Deployment operations at training centers. Air Force program management. Investor communications and data room upkeep. Hiring logistics. Pipeline hygiene. Partner coordination. Customer onboarding. If it needs to get done and the founder cannot be in two places at once, it lands on your desk and you close it.

The pace is relentless, the stakes are real, and the surface area of the company grows faster than any one person can manage alone. You are the reason it does not fall apart.

What you'll do

• Own deployment operations and customer onboarding across flight schools, airlines, and military sites

• Own the operational cadence on our Air Force engagements, including the deployment at the USAF Test Pilot School at Edwards and active integration work on the T-38 and T-6

• Manage investor and partner communications: monthly updates, data room, metrics packages

• Run hiring logistics for engineering, field operations, and business development roles

• Build and maintain operational dashboards: milestones, burn, pipeline, revenue conversion

• Standardize BD enablement: briefs, case studies, competitive positioning

• Coordinate fluently across engineering, customers, defense stakeholders, and investors

• Build the systems and cadences that let a small team operate like a much larger one

About you

• You act without being told. You see what needs to happen and you do it

• You have run programs in ambiguous, high-tempo environments. Military, startup, or both

• Sales experience or McKinsey-adjacent background. You have closed things or structured them from scratch

• Aviation background, though not necessarily as a pilot

• You can brief an investor at 8am, coordinate a deployment at noon, and prep a DoD deliverable by EOD

• You code-switch effortlessly across government and commercial audiences

• You build trackers, dashboards, and operating rhythms that keep teams honest

• You are technically literate enough to own cloud product deployments and security reporting

• You earn trust fast with engineers, pilots, instructors, and flag officers

• You understand FERPA, DFARS, and classified environments

Nice to have

• Operator background from startup, consulting, HQ staff, or founder-adjacent roles, with experience building systems in ambiguity

• Aviation or air operations experience

• Military background (field grade officer, senior NCO, or special operations with program leadership)

• Defense program experience, ideally with the Air Force or training commands

Why this role matters

Navi's constraint is not product-market fit. It is bandwidth. Every deployment, every Air Force milestone, every investor update, every new hire requires coordination that compounds as the company scales. You remove that bottleneck. The founder focuses on product, customers, and strategy. You make sure everything else moves.

This is the role with the clearest line of sight into every part of the company. What you learn here is hard to get anywhere else, and the company we are becoming is going to pay for it.

What you'll get

• Meaningful equity in a category-defining company with real revenue, real defense contracts, and real commercial deployments. If we do this right, this matters

• Flight training on Navi's dime. Earn your pilot's license and learn the domain the only way it can actually be learned

• A seat at the table on every major decision the company makes

• A role that scales into a senior operating position (COO, VP Ops, or your own thing) as the company grows

• Direct exposure to investors, generals, and customers most operators never get near in an entire career

How we work

• Find a way. We do not wait for permission or perfect information. Ideas come from anywhere regardless of title. Figure it out, ship it, iterate

• Creativity over control. First principles over process. An 80% solution today beats a perfect one next quarter

• Update fast. Come in with a hypothesis and throw it away when the data says otherwise. Ego has no place here

• Intensity with focus. We work hard because the mission demands it. Clarity on what matters is how we make that sustainable