Chief of Staff

**Reporting To**: Founder & CEO

**Environment**: We’re hybrid (Berlin)

**Opna’s Vision (formerly SALT)**

Our vision is to enable a thriving, equitable planet as the world’s most trusted and loved platform for climate finance. We envision a world where every individual and community can actively participate and benefit from building projects contributing to a low-carbon economy. Be it safeguarding our rainforests or biodiversity or operating distributed machines to extract carbon from the atmosphere, our goal is to ensure that the funding for such initiatives is easily attainable for all.

We face a defining moment in our collective fight against climate change - In the space of a few years, we must undo the damage caused by centuries-long reign of fossil fuels. This fight demands an infrastructure revolution of a scale never seen before in history
- in the form of solutions that remove and reduce carbon dioxide from our atmosphere, a.k.a carbon projects.

Today, these carbon projects face massive barriers to accessing needed financing
- the process can take years, the financing terms can be extractive and sadly, a big chunk of the financing is gobbled up by intermediaries, instead of going to the projects or the local communities.

Opna exists to remove the barriers for high-quality carbon projects to receive the early and scaling financing they need to mitigate carbon emissions and help communities and biodiversity thrive. We are on a mission to unlock capital for these high-quality climate projects, with speed, scale, and with equity_._

**What We're Building**

We are building a platform for corporates and financial institutions to directly finance high-quality, vetted carbon projects, helping these companies reach net zero goals, plugging the financing gap for projects and ultimately, rapidly scaling the deployment and supply of needle-moving climate solutions.

For context: We need to scale carbon removal to a $1 Trillion/year market a year, up from a few hundred million $/year today. This scale demands an insanely ambitious journey, against the context of an insanely urgent need to address climate change, meaningfully.

This journey will not be easy -But with the trust of our project development partners, our corporate customers, our incredible investors and above all, with our world-class team, I believe that we are in a great position to succeed

**Our Team**

Today, we’re a small and agile team of four. Collectively we have deep experience and expertise across capital markets, carbon markets, climate finance and FinTech. We keep each other accountable. We rely on regular and open communication. We share our optimism for finding solutions to climate change. We’re gritty and actively practice empathy. We are serious about our work but don't take ourselves too seriously

**Requirements**:
**The Role**

As our very first Chief of Staff(CoS), you will be the trusted advisor/mirror to Opna’s Founder and CEO, Shilps. You will drive and execute myriad ops, strategy, and ‘special project' pieces
- from super tactical to highly strategic, that will shape Opna’s next phase of growth.

You will experience the profound and far-reaching impact of your work every single day. From enabling pioneering FTSE 500 companies to reach net zero to unlocking timely and fair financing for our project development partners and their communities. Your work will matter, be it amongst the communities fighting to protect our forests and biodiversity or in corporate boardrooms where our work will inform massive climate commitments.

**What you will own**

The CoS role involves wearing many hats at once and getting the right things done with speed but also to a high standard. You will own projects across regulatory affairs, finance, ops, people, legal, comms, hiring, and possibly, a lot of firefighting.

You will help me, Shilps, to be more efficient and effective
- You will be my trusted partner who I can count on to deliver a wide-ranging set of objectives - from revenue generation to strategy to investor relations. I’d expect you to question and challenge why we do things the way we do, and you will have the freedom and agency to help us do them better.

**About you**
- Experienced in a Chief of Staff/Founder Associate role in a tech start-up.
- Experience with some/all special projects like: Tool implementation, onboarding, investor relations, leadership governance, process improvement, third party management, recruitment, fundraising, policy, contracts.
- Strong project management skills.
- You see yourself as a Swiss Army Knife i.e. you are a specialist in some areas and a generalist in others, and you are excited to work on extremely versatile projects and plug gaps
- that will often shift priorities and scope and might demand you to stretch beyond your skill set.
- You thrive on balancing many things simultaneously and delivering on them, with the right prioritization.
- Desire to constantly learn and