Chief of Staff

– Operations & Company Building –

Paris, France          Full-time

I’m Xavier Duportet, founder and CEO of Eligo. This is longer than most job descriptions you’ll read. Chief of Staff means wildly different things at different companies, so rather than write something short and vague, I’ve tried to be precise about what this one actually is – including the parts that might put you off. If you get to the end and still want it, we should talk.

I care far more about attitude and potential than credentials. I’m not looking for a particular degree, school, or five years in a job with this title. Everything above is about how you operate, not what’s on your CV – and I’d rather hire someone who’s obviously the right person and has limited experience, than someone with the right résumé and none of the traits.

 

 

// About Eligo

What if the bacteria living inside you could be turned into medicine?

Thirty-eight trillion of them live on and in your body. Some are quietly driving disease. What if you could genetically modify them inside you with CRISPR, or reprogram them to manufacture a drug continuously exactly where it’s needed?

That is the entire premise of Eligo, and for most of the last decade it sounded like science fiction. It would mean gene-editing living organisms inside a human being. It would mean rewriting a whole branch of medicine — no more carpet-bombing the body with pills and injections to reach one target.

It’s one of the hardest things anyone in biology is currently attempting. This year, we started testing it in people – and the next two years will decide whether we become the company that defines a new field of medicine.

—

We’re ~35 Eligonauts in Paris — an international team driven by one thing: getting genuinely new and frontier science to patients with real unmet needs. We embrace diversity and equal opportunity, and we’re committed to building diverse teams.

Founded by scientists and professors out of MIT and Rockefeller University, we’re backed by top-tier VCs across Silicon Valley and Europe. Our frontier science has been published in Nature, Nature Biotechnology and Science Translational Medicine, picked up by The Economist, the BBC and the New York Times, sits behind 75 issued patents, and earned us a place on the World Economic Forum’s 30 Most Innovative Companies.

// Why this role critically matters

Companies at our stage almost never die of bad strategy. They die of execution: the grant that missed its window, the six months lost to a process nobody owned, the board that learned something too late, the partner meeting nobody prepared for. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Execution eats it for lunch.

Everything Eligo has planned for the next two years runs through the machine you would own. That’s what makes this a consequential non-scientific role in the company — because none of it happens without you. And this machine is about to get significantly harder to run. Clinical-stage biotech doesn’t scale by hiring: as we advance, more of the work moves out to CROs, CDMOs, regulatory consultants and partners. Headcount stays roughly flat while the number of moving parts multiplies. We won’t solve that with more people. That’s the problem you’re solving.

For you, you’ll come out of this job knowing how to operate a company at the bolts-and-nuts level, with a 360° view, which is something very few people ever actually get to learn.

If you’re done watching other people build, this is the inside seat. You’ll see how the rouages of a biotech actually turn – and you’ll be the one tightening them. And when they turn, I get to be the CEO this company needs.

I’ll give you trust, autonomy, and real brainstorming time. I expect proactivity, humility, and excellence in return.

 

// What this role actually is

You’ll work with me, Xavier (CEO), and the leadership team. You’ll be in the engine room and will own the three things that free us to do what only we can do. My leverage is the output of your ownership — not your job description. You own our operating system, as its guardian and its improver.

1. How the company actually runs

The cadence. You run the rhythm of this company — the week, the quarter and the year.

Week to week, that’s the leadership meeting: discussions that end in decisions, action items that get closed instead of re-raised, and a view across every department that nobody else has. When Research, Development and BD each commit to something in the same room, you’re the one who connects them, spots where two commitments contradict each other, and follows up. You become the connective tissue of the leadership team — the only person holding the whole picture at once. You also sit with each leader monthly to find what’s eating their time and remove it, and you circle back with the team to catch the deliverables I owe them.

Across the year, it’s everything that makes a company move together and quietly gets dropped when everyone is busy: all-hands, offsites, performance reviews, planning and budget cycles, the board calendar, the conferences we need to show up at properly. You hold that whole calendar, you make sure the leadership team treats it as a priority rather than an interruption, and you make sure it lands on time.

Done well, this is what lets us weigh in, adapt and correct course deliberately instead of reacting to whatever arrived that week. You keep the heart beating in rhythm.

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The backbone. The operational reality of a biotech — finance and HR ops (budget, financial and investor reporting, insurance), corporate and legal ops (board corporate topics, ESOP, contracts, grants liaison), internal ops (IT, facilities, procurement, accounting). Anything that has to happen for this company to function: you own it, or you make sure it happens — with the help of our external and internal ops team (HR and corporate lawyers, accountant, auditors, lab and office managers). A good part of this runs in French, so you’ll need to work comfortably in both French and English.

–

The improvement. You hunt friction. Every recurring slowdown gets logged, triaged and killed. You find out why the same fire keeps starting instead of getting good at putting it out.

A large part of that is making us genuinely AI-native. Not an AI strategy — an AI habit. You’re the person who will work out which parts of our reporting, our document production, our data-wrangling and our admin should stop being done by hand; who builds the automation or the tooling to do it; and who gets the rest of the team actually using it. You won’t have engineers for this, and you don’t need to be one. You need to be the kind of person who reaches for a tool, wires it up, and figures out where it breaks.

2. Helping us make the critical moments land

Board meetings, partner conversations, investor updates, conferences, internal and external comms.

The substance comes from people who’ve spent their careers in this science. You own the timelines and whether it’s ready. Prep starts six weeks out, every number traces back to a source, the story is consistent with every document we’ve ever sent, and nobody is finishing slides at midnight.

You become the last line of defence before anything leaves the leadership room: is this complete, is it internally consistent, is the ask clear, is the message sharp enough to survive a sceptical reader, does it contradict what we told them in March?

When you tell me a document is ready, I stop checking. When you tell me it isn’t, you’ll have my backing.

3. Special Projects

Every quarter something lands that matters enormously and that I would benefit tremendously from having someone own: making sure it happens on time, and that significant thought and critical thinking went into it. Right now: our next non-dilutive grant, a comp framework, preparing for a major investor conference, mapping investors and running the ops backbone for our next fundraising, crafting the content strategy for our next company offsite to make it really useful for everyone.

None of these are logistics jobs. Running our next grant means working out which agency to target, how to position our research against their criteria, what we’re actually asking for, and then building the submission documents with the help of our top scientists — and getting it in. Preparing for investor and partner conferences means helping me map who will attend, matching their thesis to our roadmap, and working out what follow-up looks like. The comp framework or the company offsite means being extra curious about best practice at the best companies globally, understanding why or why not it applies to our own setting, then making it real.

This is where you’re my right hand. On the operational machinery, you take things off me entirely. On these, we work them together — you’ll have my time and my thinking, and you’ll own that they land.

 

// What you’ll own in your first 90 days

  • By day 30 — visibility. A live friction log: the recurring slowdowns, collected from every Eligonaut, triaged. A complete map of every recurring obligation this company has: all hands, close calendar, payroll cycle, board dates, ESOP grant windows. Owner and deadline for each. Nothing that recurs is ever a surprise again.

    By day 60 — ownership. Our leadership cadence is rebuilt – agenda circulated ahead, decisions logged, actions tracked and chased to closure across every department. First three frictions killed, with before/after.You run the monthly close with our accountant end to end.

    By day 90 — leverage. At least one recurring process automated end to end and actually adopted by the people who depend on it. One special project delivered — worked together, owned by you. One full board meeting prep cycle owned from six weeks out.  And a measurable number of hours a week of recurring operational load off my calendar, evidenced.

 

// The parts I’d want to know before applying

  • About 55% of this job is unglamorous, hands-on machinery. Some days the highest-value thing you do is an insurance renewal, a broken invoicing flow, and chasing four people for numbers. You do the work — you don’t assign it. None of it goes on LinkedIn, and when you do this job well the visible result is that nothing broke and nobody noticed.

    You’ll be accountable for things you don’t control. You own board prep; you don’t own the leaders who owe you their inputs. Your tools are foresight, persistence, and being someone people don’t mind being chased by.

    You won’t set strategy, and not in year one. At 35 people, scientific and business strategy is made by internal and external experts who’ve spent their careers in synthetic biology, immunology and biotech BD. You’ll help us sharpen it, pressure-test it, and make it land. Over time, the person who knows every number and every commitment we’ve made ends up with real influence on the calls themselves — but that’s earned, not granted on day one.

    Working with me: I’m direct, I move fast, I’ll change my mind and expect you to keep up. I’ll give you trust and autonomy early.

 

// I’m looking for someone who…

  • Fixes things nobody asked you to fix. Given an unassigned Friday afternoon, you rebuild a broken workflow rather than write a memo about it. You’re proactive rather than reactive.
  • Asks before going heads-down. Deeply curious, and curious in the useful direction: you’d rather spend an hour understanding why something is the way it is than three weeks executing confidently in the wrong direction.
  • Closes loops. An unresolved item bothers you more than being left out of a meeting, nothing important lives only in your head, and you plan backwards from a date so the deadline is boring.
  • Stays with a problem past the point where it stops being interesting. You finish the unglamorous 20%.
  • Reads the small print — insurance terms, grant conditions, contract clauses — because you can’t stand not knowing what’s in it. You check the number in the board deck against its source, every time, without being asked.
  • Tech-savvy and genuinely nerdy about it — the person friends ask which tool to use. You’ve automated something in your own life because it annoyed you, not because it was a project.
  • Genuinely interested in what AI agents can do, and in deploying them yourself. You don’t need to know how to build things, break them and fix them today — you need to want to learn, and to be the kind of person who works it out rather than waiting for someone to show you.
  • Can chase a busy scientist for the fourth time and have them not resent you. And you can follow a scientific conversation without being lost in a board deck — no specific background is strictly necessary, scientific literacy is.

 

 

// Sound like you?

Shoot me an email at [email protected] with your resume, your LinkedIn (and Twitter/site/whatever shows how you think), your salary expectation, and:

1. Tell me about something repetitive or broken that you fixed without being asked. What was it like before, what did you change, and how many attempts did it take before it stuck? And tell me whether it was still working six months later – or whether it fell apart once you stopped pushing.

2. What have you gone unreasonably deep on? Something nobody paid you to learn, where you probably know more than anyone else in the room. How long have you been at it – and what’s the most tedious part that you do anyway?

3. Given the split in this posting (the operational machinery versus the rest) which half do you want to be judged on at the end of year one, and why?

4. What’s one way I could have made this job posting better?

• II read every application myself, and I’m reading for specifics – your thinking, not a model’s. Use whatever tools you want; polished generalities are what lose people, not the tool.

• Bonus: the most over-engineered system in your own life – the spreadsheet, the automation, the ritual. I’m curious 🙂