Chief of Staff

Knak is a mission-driven company

Why? Because our time is limited, our competition is fierce, and our margin for error is small. For us to have the greatest impact on the world, we need to be laser focused on our core mission, which is...

Empowering people to be creative.

That’s why Knak exists.

We are a world-class enterprise email and landing page creation platform with a focus on making successful and happy customers by providing them with an incredibly powerful, yet easy to use creation platform.

Our industry leading SaaS solution is built by Marketers, for Marketers. We know that it’s the small things that make the biggest impact and that emails and landing pages are where the rubber hits the road when it comes to Marketing Automation. We change the way Marketers work by making them more efficient, while improving conversion rate of their campaigns and helping them stay on brand.

Oh, and we have a bit of fun while doing it, too!

The Role

The Chief of Staff will support the CEO across business priorities. This person will manage time, meetings, communications, follow-ups, travel, personal administration, key relationships, and the flow of information across the organization.

The ideal candidate is highly organized, resourceful, proactive, and comfortable operating in a fast-moving environment where priorities shift quickly. They should be able to attend meetings, capture action items, follow up with leaders, prepare decision points, and ensure the CEO is spending time only where he is truly needed.

The goal of this role is simple: help the CEO get time back and operate with more leverage.

What You’ll Own

Meeting Orchestration and Organizational Follow-Through

This is one of the most important parts of the role. You will attend key meetings, capture decisions and action items, and ensure commitments turn into completed outcomes.

Responsibilities include:

• Attending meetings with the CEO.
• Capturing notes, decisions, owners, deadlines, and next steps.
• Managing cross-departmental projects, and following up with leaders and team members on commitments.
• Maintaining a centralized tracker of CEO and SLT related action items.
• Driving meetings on behalf of the CEO when appropriate and bringing back concise solutions and recommendations.
• Ensuring that SLT is providing the CEO updates and insights
• Contributing to goal setting frameworks, OKR’s, and reporting.

A key part of the role is helping ensure information from customer, partner, investor, employee, and leadership conversations reaches the right people and turns into action through routing information, providing updates/follow up, and driving projects through to completion.

Executive Leverage and Decision Support

You will help the CEO move faster by turning complexity into clarity.

Responsibilities include:

• Preparing briefs and meeting prep including for QBR’s, Board Meetings, investor updates, onsites and offsites 
• Deprecating long documents, conversations, and threads into key takeaways and action items.
• Facilitating SLT meetings and agendas, identifying what decisions are needed and what information is missing.
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• Bringing a point of view to decision making , not just raw information.
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• Helping the CEO stay focused on the highest-impact priorities.

Protecting and Managing the CEOs Time

You will manage the CEO’s calendar with judgment, not just scheduling meetings, but understanding what deserves time and attention.

Responsibilities include:

• Managing and optimizing the CEO’s calendar.
• Prioritizing meetings based on impact, urgency, and CEO involvement required.
• Protecting focus time and preventing unnecessary calendar creep.
• Ensuring the CEO is prepared with the right context, materials, and decision points.
• Identifying conflicts, gaps, risks, and scheduling issues before they become problems.
• Coordinating timing across meetings, travel, calls, and personal commitments.
• Proactively communicating schedule changes or delays.

Inbox and Communication Management

You will proactively manage the CEO’s inbox and reduce the amount of work requiring direct CEO involvement.

Responsibilities include:

• Reviewing, organizing, and prioritizing email and communciations.
• Being a voice of the CEO through multi channel communication where appropriate. Handling tasks that do not require CEO decision-making.
• Tracking requests and ensuring follow-through.
• Reducing noise so the CEO can stay focused on high-value work and tasks that truely need the CEO’s attention
  
  

Anticipating Needs, Logistics, and Execution

You are constantly thinking several steps ahead, ensuring the CEO's time, travel, meetings, and priorities run smoothly.

Responsibilities include:

• Anticipating and resolving scheduling conflicts, logistical challenges, and operational friction.
• Coordinating meetings, travel, events, and day-to-day logistics with exceptional attention to detail.
• Ensuring the CEO has the right information, materials, context, and support for every commitment.
• Managing changes proactively and calmly while preventing avoidable delays or disruptions.
• Creating a seamless, organized experience that maximizes the CEO's effectiveness and focus.

Personal Administration

This role includes some personal support and administration.. 

Who You Are

You are a high-judgment operator who creates order, leverage, and momentum.

You are likely a strong fit if you are:

• Exceptionally organized, proactive, and resourceful.
• Comfortable operating in a fast-moving, high-performance environment.
• Strong at written communication and follow-through.
• Calm under pressure and highly detail-oriented.
• Comfortable holding senior leaders accountable.
• Able to anticipate needs before being asked.
• Service-oriented but not passive.
• Comfortable supporting both business and personal priorities.
• Able to take ambiguity or messy situations and turn them into clear plans.
• Trusted to handle confidential information with discretion and maturity.
• Persistent enough to ensure outcomes happen, not just reminders.
• Comfortable using judgment to route information and drive action independently.

Qualifications

• 5+ years supporting a CEO, founder, executive, or senior leader.
• Experience in a fast-growing or entrepreneurial environment preferred.
• Strong calendar, inbox, travel, and meeting management skills.
• Excellent written and verbal communication.
• High discretion handling confidential business and personal matters.
• Strong project tracking and follow-through ability.
• Comfortable using AI tools, Google Workspace, Slack, project management tools, and business systems.
• Experience working with executives, boards, investors, or professional service providers is an asset.

Why This Role Matters

The CEO’s time is one of the company’s most valuable resources. This role exists to help protect that time and ensure it is spent where the CEO can have the greatest impact.

The right person will make the CEO, leadership team, and company more effective by creating more clarity, stronger follow-through, fewer dropped balls, and less unnecessary friction.

What We Offer

At Knak we have four foundational pillars. Culture, customers, product and growth. Culture is our number one pillar because we know that is at the core of building a strong company that can build amazing products and delight our customers. We do this with a laser focus on hiring the right people who are smart, positive and who want more than the typical nine-to-five offers. 

We offer an extremely rewarding, second to none work environment as acknowledged by Ottawa’s Best Places to Work 2025! We show our investment in our people through our competitive salaries, equity in the company, great benefits, paid vacation, Life leave days (because life happens), team lunches and off-sites, and most importantly our commitment to YOUR career growth.

If this sounds like something you’re looking for, then we’d love to hear from you! 

If you don’t see yourself fully reflected in every job requirement listed on the posting above, we still encourage you to reach out and apply. Research has shown that women and underrepresented groups often only apply when they feel 100% qualified. We strongly encourage applicants of all genders, ages, ethnicities, cultures, abilities, sexual orientations, and life experiences to apply. Knak believes in creating an inclusive, barrier-free working environment. If you require ANY accommodation to the interview process please contact culture@knak.com.

At Knak, our recruitment process includes AI screening for keywords and minimum qualifications as well as video interviews which are transcribed with AI. Humans are still at the core of our decision making! 

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