Chief of Staff- Stride (Manchester)

About Stride

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Most people have accepted that being tired, stressed and slowly declining is just what adult life looks like. We don't think it has to be.

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Stride is a preventative health membership built around a full picture of your biology: DNA, microbiome, blood biomarkers, epigenetics and oral health. We test over 500 biomarkers, at least twice a year, so members can see how they're trending, not just where they stand today. Then we translate that into what to actually do: food, training, supplements, what to keep an eye on - with a coach, dietitian or physiologist working alongside them.

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It's an elite longevity concierge at an everyday price, without the clinic waiting room. Just practitioner-led guidance grounded in your own biology.

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What You’ll Do

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We're well funded and building fast, across product, growth, operations and a US launch that's all happening at once. That pace means people are heads-down building in parallel and don't always have time to look up and check things are joined up. That's where you come in.

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You'll work directly with the CEO, sitting in on the conversations where decisions get made and then making sure they actually happen afterwards: the right people told, the steps sequenced, follow-up chased without anyone having to ask twice. You won't be adding process for its own sake - Stride needs just enough structure to stop a small, fast team dropping things, and knowing where that line sits is a big part of the job. Some hours you'll be in a leadership meeting, others untangling something operational that's gone sideways, others writing the document that ends up shaping a decision. Nothing in the business is off limits, and nothing is too senior to get involved in either.

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Ownership and follow-through

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• Run the cadence of leadership meetings, offsites and planning cycles: agendas, pre-reads, decisions and the follow-through afterwards
• Keep track of the handful of priorities that matter most at any given time, and chase down anything at risk of slipping
• Take ambiguous, half-formed direction from the CEO and turn it into clear ownership, timelines and next steps
• Notice when something agreed three weeks ago has quietly gone nowhere, and close the loop
• Step into whichever part of the business needs structure that month - operations, launch planning, hiring, or a project that doesn't naturally belong to anyone - and run it end to end
• Build the lightweight trackers and rituals that keep a growing team coordinated, without adding bureaucracy

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Judgement and trust

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• Be a sounding board for the CEO, with the discretion that comes from seeing most of what happens across the business
• Know when something needs escalating, when to just decide, and when to quietly let it go
• Represent the CEO's intent accurately with the wider team, without turning into a bottleneck or a filter people resent
• Get the CEO ready for board meetings, investor updates and other high-stakes moments, with the right briefing and numbers on hand

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How You’ll Be Measured

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• Fewer things falling through the cracks: decisions get made, actioned and closed out, rather than re-litigated three weeks later
• Leadership time protected and well spent, with meetings that produce decisions rather than just discussion
• Visible improvement in how the team plans, tracks and delivers, without anyone feeling more bureaucracy
• The CEO trusts that whatever gets handed off will actually get done

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You’ll likely bring

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• Experience as a chief of staff, in a founder's office, in general management, or in a high-ownership operations role - ideally somewhere you had to build structure yourself rather than inherit it
• A track record of working closely with a founder or senior leader and being trusted with real ambiguity
• Strong organisational instincts: you're the one who builds the tracker, writes the follow-up, and spots the gap nobody else had time to notice
• Comfort without a clearly defined lane - you'll work across every function at some point, and you're fine being judged on results rather than whose job it technically was
• Strong written communication - you can take a messy conversation and turn it into something clear that people can actually act on
• Good judgement around sensitive information, given the access this role has to it
• A bias towards action: you'd rather move an imperfect plan forward than wait around for a perfect one
• Comfortable using AI tools day to day to move faster than the size of the team would otherwise allow

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Bonus points

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• Experience supporting a company through a fundraise, board process, or new market launch
• Some background in consumer health, wellness or DTC subscription businesses
• A mix of strategic and operational experience, rather than just one or the other
• Experience setting up the systems a growing team needs: OKRs, planning cycles, reporting rhythms - and knowing when not to bother

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What This Role Isn’t

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It's not an executive assistant role: you won't be managing the CEO's calendar or inbox, that support sits elsewhere, and it's not about building bureaucracy either - any process you introduce has to earn its keep, not exist for its own sake.

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It's not a back-seat role - you'll have real scope and real decisions to make, not just a seat in the room. And it's not a stepping stone: this suits someone who wants to build a career at the centre of a growing company, not pass through on the way to something else.

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Working at Stride

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• Do work that matters: preventive health is where the industry is heading, and this role helps get Stride there faster
• Sit at the centre of the business, working across every function and shaping how Stride operates as it grows
• Work directly with a founder who's already built and sold a company in this space, and taken another through a Nasdaq listing
• Free StrideOne membership after probation: testing, insights and precision supplements - plus a discount for friends and family
• Equity as part of your package
• Hybrid working from our Manchester base, 2 to 3 days in the office, with flexibility around the rest
• 25 days holiday plus bank holidays, pension with employer contribution, an annual learning budget, and your own kit

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A People team built for ambitious businesses

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The old model for People & Talent doesn’t work for today's businesses. We've built a better one.

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Traditionally, early-stage Founders had two options: handle People & Talent themselves, losing precious time they should be spending on product or go-to-market, or hire a generalist, expected to cover everything from culture to recruitment to performance. We offer a more impactful alternative: A fully flexible, fractional People & Talent team with specialist skillsets and hands-on delivery, ready to start driving impact for your business in weeks, not months.