Chief of Staff

Department: Executive Office

Location: Hybrid, UK based (with travel to our London office 3 days per week and regular travel to Barcelona)

Reports to: CEO

Hours: 37.5 per week

Salary: (Depending on experience)

Please note: when submitting your application, alongside your CV, please add a brief note (no more than 300 words) explaining why this role interests you and what you would bring to it.

Role Overview:

We are looking for a Chief of Staff to join the Executive Office. In this role, you will partner directly with the Founder & Group CEO to drive accountability, execute strategic initiatives, and create the operating rhythm that allows a scaling company to move fast without breaking. This is not a project manager with a senior title. You will be at the centre of everything: the person who ensures commitments become outcomes, who spots problems before they become crises, and who creates leverage for a Group CEO running a multi-market, multi-product business. The role is based in London with regular travel to Barcelona.

Key responsibilities:

• Drive the Operating Rhythm: Own the executive team cadence: weekly leadership meetings, monthly business reviews, quarterly planning, and business performance metrics.
• Turn strategy into execution: Track commitments to completion, follow up relentlessly, and surface blockers before they derail the plan.
• Prepare the CEO: Provide crisp briefings and decision frameworks for key meetings. You ensure the CEO walks into every room prepared to make the right call.
• Work as an integrator: Across all business functions to drive alignment and prioritisation.
• Accelerate Growth & Strategic Bets: Portfolio manage the growth roadmap: Act as the connective tissue between the CEO and the leaders of our "new bets." You ensure we aren’t just starting initiatives, but finishing them.
• Incubate and De-risk: Help validate early-stage hypotheses for new products or markets. You will conduct rapid due diligence, help shape the Go-to-Market strategy, and ensure we have the right data to double down or pivot.
• Force-multiply the CEO on Commercials: Support the Group CEO on high-stakes deal reviews and partnership opportunities. Ensure follow-through on business development actions that sit with the Executive Office.
• Cross-Pollinate Insights: Ensure learnings from one growth bet (e.g., a specific sector win in the UK) are rapidly operationalised and shared with other markets (e.g., Spain/Barcelona).
• Execute the Internal AI Strategy: Drive adoption of AI tools and workflows across the business to improve efficiency and effectiveness. Identify opportunities for AI-driven improvements in operations, delivery, and commercial functions.
• Support Product & Market Intelligence: Connect Market Signals to Revenue: Mine insights from competitors and adjacent products to inform the commercial roadmap. Support the CEO in challenging and shaping product vision with external perspective. Produce regular briefings on market threats and opportunities.
• Amplify the Founder’s Voice: Support the CEO’s podcast and thought leadership content. Help maximise ROI from networking events, conferences, and speaking opportunities. Identify high-value relationship opportunities and ensure follow-through.

What success looks like:

• At 90 days: You’ve established the operating rhythm. The exec team knows what’s expected, meetings run efficiently, and commitments are tracked systematically. You have wrapped your arms around the active growth bets and identified the primary blockers.
• At 6 months: Strategic initiatives are progressing measurably. The "new bets" have clear validation data. The Group CEO is spending time on the highest-value activities. Board prep is smooth.
• At 12 months: You’re indispensable. The business runs better because of the systems you’ve built. You’re ready to discuss your next chapter, whether that’s a GM role leading one of the bets you helped nurture, functional leadership, or continued growth as CoS.

Candidate Specification:

Essential:

• Proven operator: 4-7 years in consulting, investment banking, or strategy & ops roles at scaling startups. You’ve delivered, not just advised.
• Independent ownership: You take ambiguous goals and run with them end-to-end, creating clarity and momentum without waiting for direction.
• Accountability driver: You follow through relentlessly. Commitments don’t slip on your watch.
• High EQ: You navigate executive dynamics and hold people accountable without positional authority. Politics doesn’t scare you.
• Direct communicator: You tell the Group CEO what he needs to hear, not what he wants to hear. You’re clear, concise, and you don’t waffle.
• Low ego: You’re comfortable behind the scenes, making others successful. The win is the outcome, not the credit.

Desirable:

• Experience at a scaling company (£25M - £100M revenue, 100-400 people)
• Genuine interest in AI, EdTech, or workforce development
• Prior experience supporting a CEO or founder directly
• MBA helpful but not required

Company Benefits:

• Pension with 4% matched contributions
• Opportunity to opt into our salary sacrifice scheme
• 25 days holiday + Flexi bank holidays + 1 day off on your birthday
• A day for volunteering
• Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Leave
• Health & Wellbeing allowance of up to £30 per month
• Annual Summer and Xmas events
• Company socials including everything from Cambridge College formals, pub nights to team building events
• CPD Allowance
• Private medical insurance and cash plan
• Holiday buy back scheme (up to 10 days p/a)
• EAP with 24 hour confidential support line

Background to our Organisation:

We are an education technology company that enables corporate and government organisations to achieve their business goals by educating their workforce with critical digital transformation skills to succeed in the AI era. We deliver unique and innovative professional education that is accelerating the digital transformation of our clients, advancing the careers of their employees, helping people get into work and closing the digital skills gap. We are in a sector that is crucial to the economy and workforce, with a lot of opportunity for change and innovation. We are at the cutting edge of teaching applied data and digital skills, with our unique patented learning platform EDUKATE.AI offering our clients and learners a unique learning experience. EDUKATE.AI was developed with support from Innovate UK and provides all of our learners with 24/7 immediate feedback on their work, helping accelerate the learning process and providing a sandbox environment to experiment on real world datasets. Since 2016, we have supported more than 15,000 learners across four continents with nearly 550,000 pieces of code submitted for feedback on EDUKATE.AI. We are trusted by some of the most recognisable brands in the world to educate their workforce, including Microsoft, the NHS, GSK, easyJet, the BBC and John Lewis. Our focus on applied learning to create business impact sets us apart - individual learners have reported applying their skills at work to generate recorded value of up to £40m.

Our Values:

At the centre of the way we work together and inspire each other to achieve success are these core values:

• Entrepreneurial: We take initiative and show entrepreneurial spirit which fuels innovation at Cambridge Spark. This includes identifying opportunities for improvement, taking ownership for implementing solutions effectively and driving improvement by using proof of concepts to demonstrate the feasibility and value of their work.
• Team Spirit: Everyone is part of building an open and transparent culture, communicating effectively to raise issues, discuss improvements and share the evidence used to make decisions.
• Customer-focused: Our customers are at the centre of everything we do, inspiring us to create great work. We strive to build friendly, professional and lasting relationships with them to better understand and anticipate their needs.
• Gold Standard: We are experts in our field and are constantly developing our technology and offering. We set the benchmark in our industry: both in what we offer customers and in how we deliver it.

Cambridge Spark is an Equal Opportunities Employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind. Cambridge Spark is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunities for all employees and to providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions at Cambridge Spark are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to race, colour or ethnicity, ability or disability, gender or gender reassignment, sexual orientation, marital status, religion, age or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. Cambridge Spark will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. Cambridge Spark encourages applicants of all ages.