Chief Operating Officer

Overview

Physical Superintelligence is a highly funded seed-stage startup with team members and roots spanning Google, Meta, DeepMind, NVIDIA, Citadel, Harvard, MIT, Johns Hopkins, the Perimeter Institute, and the Institute for Advanced Study. The company is building AI systems designed to uncover new physics at scale.

The organization is looking for a Chief Operating Officer to act as a close strategic partner to the CEO, establish the company’s operational foundation, and help run PSI as a tightly integrated organization powered by AI agents.

The mission is to discover and commercialize major physics breakthroughs at scale using artificial superintelligence, with a focus on safety, verifiability, and broad public benefit.

The team believes the coming era of artificial superintelligence can catalyze a new golden age of physics, similar to how the previous one produced transistors, lasers, and nuclear energy. The company is building the infrastructure needed to industrialize scientific discovery.

Role and Responsibilities

Operations is the backbone of the company, and this role owns it. You will sit on a lean executive team and are expected to operate at the level of the whole business, not just one function. The scope centers on four major areas.

• Scale the organization by owning hiring operations and helping the company expand headcount by 2 to 3 times as it moves toward Series A, while also managing performance systems and keeping growth structured without slowing execution.
• Improve process quality and efficiency by overseeing the systems that power the company, including project management, internal and external communications, KPI tracking, legal and compliance, finance, and HR.
• Set the operating rhythm by owning planning, reporting, and decision cadences, leading operating reviews, filling gaps between functions, and designing new systems or integrating existing tools into reliable workflows.
• Run operations with an AI-first mindset by being fully comfortable with current frontier models, agent frameworks, and automation tooling, and by instrumenting the business end to end so agentic workflows increase output per person faster than headcount growth.
• Support commercial expansion by partnering with GTM leadership to define the staffing and operational needs of the commercial function as the company shifts from research-heavy work toward revenue-generating engagement.
• Build the delivery and support processes needed to make commercial operations scale alongside revenue growth, while acting as a force multiplier and thought partner to the CEO on priorities and decision support.

What We Are Looking For

• A hands-on, agentic operator who is ready to design, coordinate, and run multi-agent workflows, and who naturally thinks about what can be automated and how agents can work together reliably.
• Strong instincts for instrumentation and analytics, with comfort using SQL, BI tools, and data modeling to create the operational analytics layer before a dedicated team exists.
• Experience building internal systems such as knowledge bases, workflow tools, and integrated operating processes, with a view of the company as a control system.
• At least 8 years of operating leadership experience at a venture-backed company that has already scaled through a similar stage, including experience building people, compliance, and operating functions rather than only inheriting them.
• Executive-level judgment and the ability to operate as a trusted peer to the CEO and executive team on high-stakes decisions, with prior experience serving as a genuine strategic partner to a founder or CEO.
• Credibility in regulated and deep-tech environments, including the ability to speak confidently with sophisticated infrastructure customers and technical teams, even without needing to be a physicist or write code.
• A strong bias to execution, with a track record of moving quickly, avoiding bureaucracy, and delivering outcomes without stalling.

Nice to Have

• Experience working in regulated industries, including exposure to export control compliance and sensitive research and development environments.
• Background scaling internal operations, tooling, or platform infrastructure at a fast-growing deep-tech or AI company.
• A mix of operating leadership and hands-on technical or data work, rather than a purely people-and-process oriented background.

How We Work

• The company is engineering-led, with engineers owning problems end to end from specification through shipping and on-call support.
• Teams prefer contracts before logic, real-system testing over mocks, and straightforward designs that ship instead of overly clever approaches that do not.
• The development process is AI-native, and the same operating philosophy is expected on the company operations side.

Location, Compensation, and Other Information

This position is based in Boston and is on-site at the Cambridge hub.

The company offers competitive compensation, including salary, benefits, and meaningful early-stage equity.

Evaluation will focus on operating judgment, what you have built, and the leverage you can create.

Because of export control obligations, some responsibilities may come with citizenship or immigration-status-related restrictions, which will be discussed openly during the hiring process.

The company is an equal opportunity employer and values diverse perspectives in building platforms for AI-driven discovery.