Chief of Staff

About Kenn

Kenn is a venture-backed startup building next-generation systems to power the future of agentic work. Wes McKinney, Phillip Cloud, and Marius van Niekerk founded it in 2026. Before Kenn, Wes created pandas and co-created Apache Arrow.

kenn.io · github.com/kenn-io

The role

Kenn is hiring one person to run the operations side of the company and free up the CEO's time. You will work beside Wes McKinney, the CEO, every day, handle the work that keeps a company running, and build the agent-driven systems that make that work smaller over time.

This is a builder's job as much as an operator's. You do the work, then you automate it.

What you will do

Run the operations side

• Own investor relations and investor updates, the mailing list, HR, legal, tax, accounting, and banking.
• Manage our SaaS tools, vendors, and day-to-day finance.
• Take everything off the CEO's desk that does not need the CEO, and handle it.

Keep the company organized

• Run the operating rhythm: the weekly plan, the commitments we have made, and the follow-ups.
• Keep track of what we told investors, customers, and each other we would do, and chase what is stuck.
• Prepare for the meetings that matter and make sure they end with decisions.

What you will build

As you do the work, you will build an agent-run operating system for the company. It triages what comes in, handles what it can, and turns the rest into a short list of what to do now and what to think about next.

• Agents on top of email, our task tracker, and the rest of our tools that turn work around quickly.
• A daily and weekly briefing for the CEO and the team on what needs attention.
• Repeatable workflows for the recurring work: updates, filings, renewals, and follow-ups.

The goal is a company that runs on a very small team, with a system you understand well enough to keep improving.

Who we are looking for

• Operational excellence. You keep many threads moving at once and close them out.
• Builds with agents. You have built real workflows with coding agents, and you know how to direct them to build what you need.
• Design sense. You care how things look and feel. You can turn a messy process into something clean and simple.
• Ships. You would rather ship something and fix it than polish it for another week.
• Judgment and discretion. You will handle investor, legal, HR, and financial matters, so we have to be able to trust you.
• Clear writer. You can write an investor update, a note to our lawyer, or a team plan that people actually read.

Nice to have: time at an early-stage startup, experience in operations or finance, a technical degree, or an interest in working on internal knowledge systems and agentic tools. We care more about what you have built than where you studied or how many years you have worked.

Why join

You will work directly with Wes on a hard, new problem, at the point where the company's habits and systems are still being set. You will see how a startup is built from the inside: fundraising, customers, product, and operations, all at once.