Technical Chief of Staff – CTO

Role Overview

• Enable technical leadership and execution
• Act as a force multiplier for the CTO by translating priorities and expectations into concrete actions, deliverables, and timelines
• Reduce iteration overhead by working with owners across engineering and product teams to clarify next steps, raise quality, and ensure outputs meet expectations before CTO review
• Proactively identify where work is getting stuck and drive progress through structured proposals, clear scoping, and follow-through.
• Own preparation for technical customer meetings, including:
• Understanding end-to-end technical stacks and (machine learning) workflows
• Creating clear, compelling customer-facing narratives and presentations
• Coordinating inputs across teams
• Ensure strong follow-ups after customer meetings: Coordinate internal ownership and track execution
• Prepare materials and agendas for subsequent sessions
• Be able to run technical customer meetings, bringing in subject-matter experts as needed and ensuring high-quality outcomes
• Keep cross-functional product and engineering initiatives moving by:
• Clarifying goals and expected outputs
• Helping owners break down complex tasks into actionable steps
• Proposing initial drafts (e.g., architecture diagrams, workflows, or outlines) to accelerate feedback and decision-making
• Support process improvements that increase execution speed and clarity, while respecting clear ownership boundaries
• Enable teams through shared frameworks, templates, and best practices to improve alignment, speed, and quality across technical and product work.
• Contribute to customer-facing materials, proposals, and internal documents to raise overall quality
• Translate high-level feedback into concrete improvements in preparation, narrative, and execution
• Support early scoping of new opportunities or special projects by Structuring initial workflows and technical approaches.
• Coordinating early inputs from product, engineering, and computational drug discovery.

Requirements

• 3-5 years of experience in fast-paced, high-output environments such as strategy consulting (e.g., MBB), venture capital, or high-growth startups or scaleups
• Strong technical background (e.g. computer science, engineering, sciences, or related field) with the ability to understand and communicate complex systems end-to-end, across infrastructure, ML models, data flows, and product workflows
• Ability to build a solid working understanding of the full technical stack and communicate effectively with infrastructure engineers, ML engineers, scientists, and product managers
• Strong capability to distill complex and fragmented technical input into clear summaries, structured options, and decision-ready recommendations for leadership and customers
• Ability to operate with ambiguity, proactively propose initial solutions, and use structured drafts (e.g. architecture diagrams, workflows, outlines) to accelerate alignment and progress
• Strong proficiency in core tools, including Atlassian suite, PowerPoint, product prototyping tools like Lovable/Bolt and ability to build high-quality materials fast, using modern AI and productivity tools
• Excellent execution skills, organization, and attention to detail, with a strong ownership mindset and focus on outcomes rather than tasks
• High ownership mindset; you take responsibility for outcomes, not just tasks
• Comfort working in a remote-first environment across distributed teams
• Curiosity and willingness to learn about AI-driven drug discovery, the broader life sciences ecosystem, and Apheris’ customers
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with confidence in customer-facing settings
• English: C2 level; German optional
• Nice to have Prior experience working with AI/ML systems, distributed systems, or data-intensive platforms
• Exposure to life sciences, pharmaceutical R&D, or scientific software products
• Experience improving internal execution through better tooling, templates, or lightweight processes.

Tech Stack

• Distributed Systems

Benefits

• Industry-competitive compensation, including early-stage virtual share options
• Remote-first working – work where you work best, whether from home or a co-working space near you
• Great suite of benefits, including a wellbeing budget, mental health benefits, a work-from-home budget, a co-working stipend and a learning and development budget
• Generous holiday allowance
• Office Days at our Berlin HQ or a different European location (3x a year)
• A fun, diverse team of mission-driven individuals with experience across leading organizations (e.g., MBB, Palantir, NVIDIA, top pharma) and a drive to see AI and ML used for good
• High exposure to core strategic and technical topics, significant ownership from day one, and plenty of room to grow personally and professionally while shaping your own role