It has been an exciting few days! I am thrilled to share that I’ve officially transitioned into a new role as Chief of Staff — CTO’s Office at Factors.ai, moving over from my previous position as a Technical Program Manager.
Anyone who has worked in a fast-growing startup knows that job titles are often just starting points. The reality of a startup environment is fluid—you see a gap, you fill it. You see a repetitive manual task, you write a script to automate it. Ever since I started working at Factors, my day-to-day had organically evolved well beyond traditional TPM boundaries to fill various operational and technical needs across the engineering team.
I was already deeply involved in building internal tools and untangling operations simply because the work needed to be done. Having this officially formalized feels like a fantastic validation of that “wear-many-hats” startup philosophy.
So, what exactly does a Chief of Staff to the CTO do here? The mandate for this role spans across five core pillars, perfectly aligning with the kind of high-leverage, system-level work I love doing:
- Technical Research, POCs & Internal Tooling: This is where I get to stay hands-on. I will be building technical Proof of Concepts and leading research projects to validate new product ideas before they require massive engineering resources. More importantly, I’ll be architecting the internal automations and tools—often relying on efficient, pure engineering logic—that keep our coordination, monitoring, and daily operations running smoothly. If a manual process is slowing the team down, my job is to automate it out of existence.
- Security, Compliance & Trust: As we scale, trust is our most critical asset. I am taking end-to-end ownership of the organization’s security posture. Beyond just checking boxes, this means actively managing our major certifications (like SOC2, ISO, and GDPR), driving the resolution of VAPT (Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing) findings, and serving as the tip of the spear for customer security assurance by tackling those complex Infosec questionnaires.
- Engineering Operations & QA: This pillar is all about driving operational efficiency from the inside out. I will be managing the QA team to ensure our bar for product quality remains uncompromising. It also involves orchestrating our release cycles and facilitating the cross-functional syncs between Design, Engineering, and Product so that nothing gets lost in translation from whiteboard to deployment.
- Operational Enablement: A great developer experience starts on day one and relies on frictionless day-to-day operations. I am managing the full lifecycle of engineering enablement, which covers streamlining new hire onboarding, managing complex access controls, and overseeing IT assets and devices so the team has exactly what they need to ship great code.
- Strategic Execution: Ultimately, my role is to act as a force multiplier for the CTO’s office. This is the “whatever it takes” bucket. I will be executing high-priority, cross-functional special projects and diving into the weeds to unblock critical bottlenecks across the organization as they arise.
It is a massive scope that essentially serves as the operational engine for the engineering organization. It’s a lot to tackle, but because I’ve already been laying the groundwork for many of these pillars, I am ready to hit the ground running.
I am incredibly grateful for the trust the leadership team has placed in me. Time to get back to building!