Chief Operating Officer

Location: San Francisco Bay Area; significant travel required
Company: Buoyant Aero, Inc.
Reports to: Founders

About Buoyant

Buoyant Aero builds and operates autonomous aerial platforms for advertising, media, and emerging dual-use applications.

We are a hardware and operations company. We design and build aircraft, move equipment and teams around the country, launch operations in new cities, work directly with customers, and operate aircraft in complex real-world environments.

We have proven that the business can work.

Our next challenge is making it scale.

We are looking for a Chief Operating Officer who can take a fast-moving, founder-led company and build the systems, team, and operating discipline required to grow from a small number of successful operations into a national operating network.

The Role

This is not a traditional corporate COO role.

You will be responsible for turning Buoyant from a company that succeeds through individual effort and founder involvement into an organization that executes reliably through systems, processes, accountability, and strong managers.

You will own the operating machine behind the company: deployment operations, manufacturing and supply chain, logistics, people operations, financial planning, and the systems that connect them.

The right person will be equally comfortable designing an operating model for the next three years and personally fixing a broken deployment plan tomorrow morning.

What You'll Own

Scale the Operating Model

• Build the operating system required to grow from a handful of deployments to many simultaneous operations across the country.
• Turn successful one-off processes into documented, measurable, repeatable systems.
• Establish clear ownership, operating rhythms, KPIs, planning processes, and accountability across the organization.
• Identify operational bottlenecks before they constrain growth.
• Reduce the company's dependence on founders for day-to-day execution.

Deployment & Field Operations

• Build a scalable model for launching and supporting operations in new markets.
• Improve deployment planning, staffing, logistics, equipment movement, customer coordination, and operational readiness.
• Develop systems that allow multiple customer operations to run simultaneously.
• Drive reliability, utilization, cost efficiency, and continuous improvement across the operating network.
• Work closely with flight-operations leadership while maintaining clear separation between business requirements and flight-safety authority.

Manufacturing, Supply Chain & Logistics

• Build a scalable supply and production system for Buoyant's growing fleet.
• Improve sourcing, supplier management, inventory planning, production scheduling, and logistics.
• Develop strategies for reducing lead times, supply risk, and unnecessary complexity.
• Lead efforts to onshore or dual-source critical components where it makes operational and economic sense.
• Improve the flow of aircraft, parts, equipment, and consumables between manufacturing locations and operating markets.
• Build the infrastructure necessary to move from prototype-style production toward repeatable fleet manufacturing.

People & Organization

• Build and manage a high-performing organization as the company grows.
• Develop the managers and organizational structure required to scale beyond direct founder management.
• Establish clear responsibilities, expectations, and performance standards.
• Build recruiting processes capable of hiring quickly without lowering the talent bar.
• Make difficult personnel decisions decisively when someone is not succeeding in their role.
• Create an organization where accountability is clear and problems are surfaced early.

Financial & Business Operations

• Own company budgeting, operating forecasts, resource planning, and financial accountability in partnership with the founders and finance resources.
• Develop clear visibility into operating costs, deployment economics, manufacturing costs, staffing requirements, and cash needs.
• Translate company strategy into operating plans and budgets.
• Build decision-making systems that allow the company to allocate people and capital intelligently.
• Help leadership understand what the company can realistically execute and what tradeoffs are required.

Founder & Leadership Partnership

The founders are fast-moving, entrepreneurial, and highly involved in the business. The COO will complement that style by creating structure without creating bureaucracy.

You should be comfortable:

• Turning ambitious ideas into executable plans.
• Saying "not yet" when priorities exceed organizational capacity.
• Creating clarity when plans are changing quickly.
• Holding leaders accountable to commitments.
• Making decisions with incomplete information.
• Bringing order to situations that initially look messy.
• Preserving speed while eliminating unnecessary chaos.

We want someone who makes the company faster because it is organized, not slower because it has more process.

What We're Looking For

Required

• Significant senior operating leadership experience.
• Experience scaling a physical-world business from a small number of working operations into a substantially larger operating system.
• Experience managing complex, distributed operations.
• Experience with hardware, manufacturing, logistics, field operations, or another business where physical things must reliably move through the world.
• Strong supply-chain and operational-optimization experience.
• Experience building and managing growing teams.
• Demonstrated ability to recruit and build teams quickly.
• Demonstrated willingness to address underperformance and make difficult personnel decisions.
• Strong financial and analytical instincts.
• Ability to move comfortably between strategic planning and extremely hands-on problem solving.
• High personal organization and exceptional follow-through.
• Ability to operate effectively in an ambiguous, rapidly changing startup environment.

Particularly Valuable

Experience scaling something like:

• One operating location into many.
• A prototype or early-production hardware business into repeatable production.
• A small field-operations team into a distributed national workforce.
• Tens of employees into hundreds.
• A founder-dependent company into a professionally managed organization.

We care more about having personally lived through this transition than having worked at a large company after the hard scaling work was already complete.

Nice to Have

• Aviation or airline operations experience.
• Aerospace, drones, robotics, autonomous systems, or advanced hardware experience.
• Experience operating regulated systems.
• Experience with fleet businesses.
• Experience onshoring manufacturing or restructuring a supply chain.
• Experience with government or defense customers.

Aerospace experience is helpful, but it is not required. We would rather hire an exceptional operator from another complex physical-world business than a mediocre executive who happens to come from aerospace.

Who Will Thrive Here

You are probably a strong fit if:

• Messy situations make you want to organize them.
• You like building systems more than talking about systems.
• You have unusually high standards for follow-through.
• You are comfortable challenging founders.
• You don't need a large staff before you can make progress.
• You can negotiate a supplier contract in the morning, interview an operations leader in the afternoon, and review next year's operating plan that evening.
• You know when a process is necessary and when a process should simply be deleted.
• You believe speed and discipline reinforce each other rather than compete.

What Success Looks Like

Within the first 12 months:

1. Buoyant can execute multiple simultaneous operations without constant founder coordination.
2. Manufacturing, supply chain, staffing, deployment logistics, and financial planning operate from clear systems and forecasts rather than emergencies.
3. The organization has strong functional owners, clear accountability, and the management infrastructure required for the next stage of growth.

The ultimate measure of success is simple:

Buoyant should be able to grow dramatically without becoming dramatically more chaotic.

Compensation

Competitive executive salary plus meaningful equity, commensurate with experience.

This is an opportunity to build the operating foundation of an unusual company at the point where the challenge is shifting from proving that something can work to proving that it can work at scale.