Chief of Staff, Zero Gravity
£60-80k
3-5 days a week in office (Old Street, London)
Creating AI technology that breaks the link between background and opportunity
Posted today
Creating AI technology that breaks the link between background and opportunity
21-100 employees
Posted today
£60-80k
3-5 days a week in office (Old Street, London)
21-100 employees
Company mission
To unlock the UK's potential by empowering ambitious students to access world-class learning, universities and careers.
Role
Who you are
- Exceptional judgement — trusted to handle the organisation's most sensitive situations with maturity and discretion.
- Outstanding written communicator — clear and credible across board papers, legal agreements, and grant applications.
- A genuine generalist — as comfortable reviewing a contract as designing a review process or presenting to the board.
- Highly organised — structured thinking and rigorous tracking across many parallel workstreams.
- Straight-talking — willing to push back and say what you think in a room full of senior people.
- Comfortable with ambiguity — you figure it out, make a call, and move.
- Genuinely excited about AI — as a capability to build across an organisation, with your own view on where it's going.
What the job involves
- The Chief of Staff is the connective tissue of Zero Gravity, working alongside the executive team across people, legal, compliance, finance, systems, and governance.
- The job is context: reading nuance, spotting problems early, and joining the dots across a fast-moving organisation. AI increasingly handles the doing, which makes that kind of judgement more valuable, not less.
- You'll own complex, high-stakes workstreams end to end, from shareholder agreements to ISO certification to some of our most sensitive situations, with real autonomy and trust.
- You'll drive Zero Gravity's AI transformation: the tools, infrastructure, and culture change that make adoption stick and keep us ahead of the curve as the technology evolves.
- You will own annual strategy design and quarterly OKR cycles — shaping company-wide priorities and reporting on progress to the whole organisation.
- Run the full employee/HR lifecycle end-to-end: contracts, leave, performance, people management, and the policy suite that underpins it all.
- Maintain compliance and keep Zero Gravity ahead of its legal and regulatory obligations.
- Lead engagement initiatives, internal comms, and AI upskilling programmes that shape how the team works and grows.
- Own financial planning rhythms: payroll, expenses policy, the health insurance scheme, asset register, and board-level financial reporting.
- Prepare board papers and minutes, manage shareholder comms, and administer the EMI options scheme — acting as the connective tissue between leadership and the board.
- Support fundraising directly, from investor materials to legal due diligence.
- Line manage our Operations team, setting clear priorities and developing their capability. Oversee their work on legal & compliance, data, internal systems & operations, office management, and safeguarding across the organisation.
Application process
- 1. Apply via WTTJ
- 2. Initial 30 minute interview
- 3. Technical round to assess how you approach your work
- 4. Values interview with Founder and other team members
Salary benchmarks
Our take
Zero Gravity unleashes the potential of talented students from low-income backgrounds by propelling them into university, work, and life. Since its launch, it's mentored over 23,000 low-income students into highly selective universities and hundreds into elite careers. Believing that talent is spread evenly, but opportunity is not, it's dedicated to changing that so students can achieve futures they once thought impossible.
It unlocks students' potential by breaking down barriers to opportunities through the power of membership, providing funding opportunities, mentorship and scholarships. Its mentoring and masterclasses offer an inside track to reaching the best universities and careers, with technology that enables the company to achieve these goals at speed and scale. Alongside its mentorship schemes, Zero Gravity is building AI products that support its students. AI tutoring products are its first step into this space, with one-to-one tutoring recognised as a major lever in academic improvement, and one not often available to low-income students.
Zero Gravity was selected by the Department for Education's AI Pioneers programme to develop classroom-ready AI tutoring tools, and plans to expand in this space as its growth continues. Through its AI products and programs, as well as financial aid, Zero Gravity is committed to ensuring that every student has the opportunity to reach their full potential.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Jun 2024
$2.3m
SEED
Dec 2021
$4.8m
SEED
Total funding: $7.6m
Company benefits
- 📈 | Share options: Own a piece of Zero Gravity with our 'Zero Gravity For All' options scheme
- 💂♀️ | Central London Office: Work from our beautiful Zero Gravity HQ in Barbican/Old Street, while enjoying flexible WFH options
- 🩺 | Private Healthcare: Extensive private health insurance, including dental, mental health support, and gym discounts
- 💳 | Zero Gravity Card: £500 annually to spend on your personal development with your very own Zero Gravity Card
- 🏃♀️ | Monthly Socials: Join us for fun team socials, completely on-the-house. Quarterly, we go big with sports days, BBQs, and more
- 🎄 | Christmas Shutdown: Enjoy 3 extra festive days off, plus 25 days of annual leave and 8 bank holidays
- 💻 | Company MacBook: Get the latest Apple gear to stay ahead of the game
Company values
- Stand Up Straight: We say what we think and mean what we say. We’re straight talkers who hold ourselves and others to a high standard, owning our mistakes and always striving for improvement.
- Run Towards Danger: We push ourselves to the limit and refuse to stand still. We embrace imposter syndrome by taking risks, failing fast, and venturing into the unknown. Because playing it safe ≠ progress.
- Make It Happen: We focus on creating incredible results rather than obsessing over process. There’s an inherent drive in our work: a bias toward taking action, moving fast, and delivering what matters.
- Unleash Your Agent: We harness AI to multiply our impact. We rethink how things are done from first principles, staying curious about what's possible and defaulting to AI-first approaches.
Company HQ
Old Street, London
Articles
Leadership
Joe Seddon
(Founder & CEO)Award-winning social entrepreneur who has scaled Zero Gravity from his student bedroom into one of the UK's leading tech-for-good startups. Featured in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
Tom Haywood-Pope
(COO)Commercial leader with 10 years’ experience scaling social impact and EdTech startups. Drives Zero Gravity’s growth and partnerships, supporting 20,000+ students into top unis and careers.
People progressing
Charlotte joined Zero Gravity as a Founder Associate before being promoted to Chief of Staff where their role now oversees business strategy.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Zero Gravity
Joe Seddon (Founder & CEO)
- Zero Gravity exists to power incredible talent from low-opportunity backgrounds into top universities and careers. This mission is at the core of everything we do, and we only hire people who live and breathe our mission.
- I originally started Zero Gravity from my hometown bedroom in West Yorkshire with the last £200 of my student loan. I come from a single-parent background, went to a state school, and hired my first team member at the age of 22. My own journey has instilled in me a belief that age and background should never be a barrier to advancement!
- We believe in real diversity rather than token gestures. We’ve built our Zero Gravity culture around empowering top talent from all backgrounds, making Zero Gravity the ultimate meritocracy. 40% of our team members are from socially mobile backgrounds and 57% of our managers are internal promotions.
- We apply our Zero Gravity philosophy to our own hiring process, including recruiting team members directly from our platform, implementing contextual recruitment techniques in our hiring process, and having a clear evaluation framework for candidates which takes into account background and performance in context.
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