Senior Project Manager / Chief of Staff

Title: Senior Project Manager — Founding Team

Compensation: Equity-only at founding-team level (0.5–1.5% range, negotiated) + cash conversion on Series A close

Reports to: James G. E. Knurbein (Founder/CEO)

Start: Immediate

About Lens

Lens is the institutional infrastructure for media trust. We are building IQS — an Independent Quality Score that lets readers, institutions, and platforms verify the integrity of any piece of content at the source layer. Backed by GK Media Group LLC. Pre-seed closing now; Series A on the horizon.

The role

You are the operating spine of a founding team running a one-month sprint to a public hard launch and a $3M seed close. You translate the Founder's intent into shipped work across engineering, design, hiring, investor relations, and content. You run the cadence, hold the timeline, and call the bottlenecks before they bite. This is not a project-tracker-babysitter role. You are the second decision-maker in the room. When the Founder
is in an investor meeting, you are on the floor.

What you will own

• Daily standup, weekly all-hands, monthly review cadence across the full team
• The single source of truth for the sprint timeline — what ships when, who owns it, what's blocked
• Coordination of the 20+ hire pipeline currently in flight (sourcing, interviews, offers, onboarding)
• Investor materials prep alongside the CFO and Founder — Audacity Capital close is the immediate one
• Cross-department dependency tracking — Lens × CFE × OR factory × personal brand
• Vendor and contractor relationships (legal, design, print, hosting, infrastructure)
• The "is this actually getting done" function — verifying delivery, not just status

What you bring

• 4+ years in operations, project management, or chief-of-staff roles at a startup or scaling team
• Track record of holding a complex cross-functional schedule together under time pressure
• Comfort with ambiguity and a Founder who moves fast and changes direction when warranted
• Direct, no-bullshit communication style — you push back when you see something wrong
• Bias to action, not to process

Bonus

• Background in media, AI, or trust/safety infrastructure
• Have run a hiring sprint or scaled a team from 5 to 20+
• Experience with equity-compensated founding-team economics

Compensation philosophy

You take a meaningful equity stake in exchange for sweat now. Once Series A closes, equity converts partially to cash compensation at market rate. We are transparent about this from day one. If you need a market-rate salary today, this is not the right role for you. If you want to own a piece of what we are building, we want to talk.

Apply

Send a short note to [email protected] with: (a) one paragraph on a project you held together when it was about to come apart, (b) why Lens, (c) what equity vs cash mix would actually work for you. Skip the cover-letter template. We read every email.