Chief of Staff

What we're building

Almost every major asset in American life has a professional management layer. Investments are managed by Fidelity and Vanguard; rental and commercial property by operators paid to keep it in good order. The exception is the home. The largest asset most people will ever own, part of a $55 trillion asset class, is still managed by the owner in the evenings, between everything else.

The cost of that gap is enormous in aggregate. A water heater nobody has flagged, a slow leak behind the washing machine, a $200 tree trim that became a $50,000 claim: together these explain much of why insurance premiums have risen 72% since 2019, maintenance 85%, and emergency repairs 175%. Until recently, the only way to avoid them was an estate manager. AI can now do that job at software cost.

Rafter is an AI agent that manages your home. Think of it as Instinct for the home: a personal agent that actually gets things done, focused on the one asset where the stakes are highest. Our agent, Ezra, knows the home and what it needs before it becomes urgent, then sources the provider, checks the price, manages the schedule, and follows through until the job is verified, then writes the outcome to a permanent Home Record so every project makes the next one smarter. The homeowner approves in a single text.

We're two years in, serving real homes in the New York metro area, with paying institutional partners and more inbound demand than we can currently pursue. That is why this role exists.

The role

Chief of Staff is the highest-leverage seat at a company this size, built for the passionate generalist who is drawn to hard problems more than to any single discipline. The title means different things at different companies, so to be clear about which one this is: this is not the calendar-and-logistics version of the role. It is the extension-of-the-CEO version, where you take on the founders' highest-priority problems and own them. You'll report to Anil, work closely with both co-founders on whatever matters most in a given quarter, and carry it through to completion. There is deliberately no fixed lane.

What makes that breadth possible is the way Rafter works. Our product is an agent, and the company operates the same way: research, outreach, analysis, and reporting happen with AI in the loop by default, which means one person with strong judgment and the right tools can do work that used to require a team. You are not being asked to be a department of one through sheer effort. You're being asked to be the person who directs the leverage.

In one stretch you might be building the business development engine, running agents that research and qualify targets, sharpening the outreach they draft, and keeping the pipeline moving. In another you might be supporting our partner programs alongside Anil, building the reporting our partners rely on and making sure homeowners who arrive through a partner have a great experience. You'll do customer success, talking directly with homeowners and bringing back what no dashboard would have shown us. You'll run the company's operating rhythm, from metrics to reporting to planning, and you'll take on whatever is most important and unowned at the moment, whether that's partner collateral, investor materials, or pricing.

The breadth is the point, not a compromise. What lets someone move fluently between those areas isn't prior experience in each (nobody has that) but the traits below, combined with real fluency in working through AI. If you already reach for an agent before you reach for a spreadsheet, you'll feel at home.

We see this as a twelve-to-eighteen-month tour through every part of the business, after which you'll have found the area you're best at and will go run it. We'd rather grow that person than hire them later, and the equity is sized accordingly.

Who we're looking for

The profile we have in mind is three to five years in: two or three years in a demanding analytical environment such as consulting, banking, private equity, or venture, followed by time in an operating role at a fast-growing startup. That path isn't a credential we're checking for its own sake. It's the most reliable place we know to find the qualities below, because the first stint builds the analytical floor and the second proves you can operate without one being handed to you. If you've done both, you'll recognize yourself in this list. If your path looks different but the list still describes you, we want to hear from you too.

• Intense curiosity. You want to understand how things actually work, and you go find out rather than waiting to be told.
• A bias to ownership. When something is important and unowned, you pick it up and carry it to done. Early-stage work is mostly unglamorous loose ends, and closing them is what impact actually looks like.
• Learning velocity. You can go from knowing nothing about a domain to being credible in it in weeks, and you've done it before.
• Judgment, held with low ego. You can tell urgent from important, you'll make a call with imperfect information, and you care more about the right answer than about whose idea it was.
• AI-native instincts. You already run your own work through AI tools and agents, you have opinions about what they do well and poorly, and building a company that operates like one is a large part of why you're reading this.
• Clear thinking, in writing and in numbers. We treat writing as the proxy for thinking, and you can build the model, read the funnel, and design a metric that tells you something true.
• Genuine interest in the people we serve. Our homeowners are not personas, and our best insight has come from people who picked up the phone.

You'll need to be based in or near New York City; we're in person often enough that it matters.

Who you'll work with

You'll work directly with both co-founders: Anil Nathan (McKinsey, Uber), who leads partnerships, investors, and positioning, and Marcus Cohn (2U, pre-Series A through IPO), who leads product and engineering. Around them is a lean engineering team, a field operations group working in real homes, and advisors from Google DeepMind, Policygenius, Willis Towers Watson, and Curated.

Compensation and logistics

• Base salary: $100,000–$120,000, depending on experience
• Equity: an early-employee grant sized for one of Rafter's first ten hires, with standard four-year vesting. The base is deliberately modest for this profile; the equity is where the upside is, and we'll share the specific grant early in the process rather than at offer.
• Location: New York City area, hybrid

How to apply

Send a résumé and a short note to careers@rafterhome.com. It goes straight to Anil. Rather than a cover letter, tell us three things: something you owned end to end and what went wrong along the way; something you taught yourself because you wanted to know; and something you've built or automated with AI that you actually use.

Rafter is an equal opportunity employer.

Every home deserves an agent working in its interest.