Remote Chief Pilot Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

Job Description
Chief of Staff to the CEO (Execution) - Contract
Reports to the CEO • Remote (US), Occasional travel to Southern California • Early career welcome
About Korrus
Korrus is transforming the way people interact with light. We are the leader in human-centric lighting, built on more than 500 patents in spectral and circadian technology, and pioneers in Human Light Interaction, the next frontier in human health and wellness.
That work runs on three fronts:
• Ecosense. A globally known and respected leader in architectural and commercial lighting, and the business now bringing circadian technology into the spaces where people work, heal, learn, and gather.
• OIO. Our consumer brand, bringing circadian lighting into the home: biologically aligned light, the right spectrum at the right time of day, to support how people wake, focus, and rest.
• Everything else in Human Light Interaction. We are pushing the limits of what light can do for human health and performance, and we own the intellectual property to do it.
Behind the products is a real, complex company: engineering, manufacturing, a global supply chain, a commercial sales organization, a consumer business, and the operations that tie it all together. We run it as a horizontal organization with AI as the backbone. We care far less about the functional title you have held than about whether you can operate across all of it.
The role
This is a broad, high-ownership role in the Office of the CEO. You are the person any member of the leadership team can point at a problem. You take the direction, translate it into a plan with an owner, a date, and a definition of done, then make sure it happens.
You will report to the CEO and work daily with the CEO, CFO, and CIO of a global business. In a single week you can work with product development, engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, finance, a consumer brand going to market, and you will be deploying AI across all of it. You will have a direct mandate from the CEO with full visibility.
You do not need years of experience, and you do not need to know lighting. You need range, an unusual learning rate, and the nerve to hold a room accountable to what it committed to.
Who we are looking for
This is a deliberate profile. If you recognize yourself here, we want to talk to you.
• You intend to start a company. This seat is the fastest honest way to see how an entire business actually works: the P&L, the factory, the channel, the product, the decisions and their consequences. Some of the best people in this role use it as the last stop before founding something. We would rather hire that person than someone looking for a safe title for the next ten years.
• You are looking at entrepreneurship through acquisition. You want to buy and run a real business. Come learn how one is actually operated, from the people operating it, before you go do it with your own capital on the line.
• You just finished an MBA and you are better than your offer list. We do not care who interviewed you or who did not. We care what you can do here, and we will find out fast.
• You did your two years in investment banking or consulting. You are tired of building the recommendation and never seeing it land. Here you own the execution, and the outcome has your name on it.
What every one of those people has in common is capacity, acumen, and a willingness to earn their stripes.
What you get out of it
• A direct line to the CEO and CFO of a global business, and a seat in the rooms where the calls actually get made.
• Range across executive leadership, finance, accounting, innovation, engineering, product development, supply chain, manufacturing, operations, and a consumer brand launching into the market. Not a rotation through them one at a time: all of it, at once.
• The mandate to deploy AI across an entire organization, not to run a pilot in one corner of it.
• Real operators to learn from, in an industry that is being rebuilt around science that did not exist a decade ago.
• Two years of this and you will know how a company is actually run. That is the trade, and it is the reason to take this job over a safer one.
What this role is not
• Not an executive assistant with a better title. You will not manage calendars, book travel, or take notes for other people.
• Not a ceremonial chief of staff. You are measured on outcomes that shipped, not meetings you attended.
• Not a product, engineering, or design decision maker. You hold the line on what was committed to and when.
• Not a specialist seat. If you want to go deep in one function and be judged on that function alone, this is the wrong role.
How we see your first few weeks
We expect you to start with a learning phase: time to understand the business, meet the people whose work you will be driving, and find the first problem worth owning. Expect to ask a great many questions, and expect us to make time for them. We would rather you scope the work properly than rush to a fixed timeline. You will own something real early, and grow quickly into driving work across the whole company.
What you'll do
• Take direction from any member of the leadership team and drive it to completion across whatever functions it touches.
• Turn a one-line intent into a plan: scope, owner, date, definition of done, and the two or three things that will actually make it late.
• Run the operating cadence: program status, gate reviews, commitments, and the follow-through in between. Surface slippage early, not at the deadline.
• Diagnose why work is late, and go find the answer at the source rather than passing along the explanation you were given.
• Build AI-assisted and agentic workflows that do this work at a scale one person could not, and keep raising what a single operator can cover.
• Prepare the analysis and the materials that leadership, and sometimes the board, make decisions from.
What we're looking for
• Range. Enough engineering, finance, operations, and commercial sense to hold your own in any of those rooms and not be lost. Depth in one of them is a bonus, not the requirement.
• Capacity. You absorb an unreasonable amount, quickly, and you connect it across disciplines rather than filing it by department.
• Energy. This job is demanding, and the people who do it well want it that way.
• Fearlessness. You will ask the leadership team the question you think sounds dumb, in the room, in front of everyone. You will pick up the phone and call the person who has not answered your fifth email.
• Initiative. Told to get over there, you figure out the route. You do not wait for the door-by-door version.
• Business acumen, including real comfort with a P&L and the numbers underneath it.
• Genuine fluency with modern AI tools and agentic workflows, and the taste to know when the output is not good enough. You want to learn more, not less.
• Two to four years in banking, consulting, private equity, or high-growth operations, or an engineering background. A recent MBA is a strong fit; an engineer who then did an MBA is our ideal.
• Where you went to school matters far less to us than whether you have something to prove.
• No lighting industry experience required, and none expected.
How we evaluate people here
We assess every person at Korrus on four dimensions. We will use them on you in the interview, in the exercise, and every month you are here, so they are worth understanding before you apply.
• Energy. The effort you actually exert. It is the easiest dimension to over-index on, and it is a floor, not a ceiling.
• Attitude. How you show up. Not whether you participate, but whether your presence makes the work better. The standard is proactive contribution: receive what is in front of you, build on it, and move the work forward through the ambiguity.
• Competency. What you know, and increasingly the judgment to hold work up against the right quality bar and know what good looks like, whether that work is yours, your team's, or produced by AI.
• Capacity. The rate at which you acquire competency and direct it. This is the dimension AI compounds: the more you master the tools, the more leverage you get, and the more leverage you get, the faster you learn.
Attitude and Capacity are the entrance requirements, at any level, on any day. Competency determines where and how fast you contribute. Energy determines whether you are carrying your share of the load. For this seat we are hiring early in the journey, which sets the profile: high Energy, high Attitude, high Capacity, and competency in our business that you will build here rather than bring with you.
Strong pluses
• You have started something of your own, or intend to.
• You have built AI-assisted or agentic workflows that other people came to rely on.
• Experience across a hardware business: engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, or the commercial side of one.
Logistics and compensation
• Contract Role
• $11,000-$15,000/Monthly DOE
• Remote (US), with meaningful overlap with Pacific working hours and occasional travel to Southern California for in-person working sessions.
• Reports to the CEO, with a standing mandate to take direction from any member of the leadership team.
To be considered
Send us your resume and, in two or three sentences, tell us about a time you were responsible for something you had no authority over and got it done anyway. We are especially interested in what you did with AI to make it faster. Finalists complete a short, paid exercise built from a real problem of the kind this job produces every week, so we can see how you work.
Korrus is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic.
This position is not eligible for current or future visa sponsorship.