Company

Laya is a modern accounting, tax, and advisory firm for businesses that want predictable monthly closes, decision-ready reporting, and a clear path from accounting to tax and advisory. We pair licensed experts with technology we build ourselves, and we run industry-specific playbooks — from startups and agencies to restaurants, retail, and professional services — so our clients' books reflect how their business actually works. We are a distributed team, working across the US, India, Latin America, and the Philippines.

Our product is financial truth, so we hire and retain against four values. They are ordered from least trainable to most trainable, and when two of them collide, the higher one wins.

- Integrity. Always doing the right thing and owning your actions — not situational, and not dependent on whether anyone is watching. The numbers are what the numbers are. Mistakes surface immediately and travel upward, and we own our decisions in writing.
- Talent. The raw ability to reason through a problem you have never seen before and to take on current domains quickly. We hold a high bar and would rather leave a seat open than fill it below that bar — and we owe real development to everyone who clears it.
- Grit. Doing whatever it takes to deliver an outcome you have claimed as yours. Setbacks produce a next step, not an explanation, and the unglamorous work gets the same commitment as the interesting work.
- Expertise. The judgment that comes from having seen the work — many clients, many edge cases, many closes. It ranks last only because it is the one thing we can build here; the first three you bring with you.

How we work follows from that. We define the outcome before the work starts — what "done" means, by when, and who owns it. We turn everything we do repeatedly into written process, because a process that lives in one person's head is a liability, not an asset. And we delight clients through the absence of surprise: reliability, proactivity, and clarity, always inside scope. Everyone here is measured on the same three dimensions they were hired against — Reasoning, Process, and Communication.

Role





This is the role for someone who wants to see how a company actually gets built, from the inside, and who would rather be handed a problem than a task list.

You will work directly with Laya's exec team on whatever most needs doing that quarter. Right now that means three things: helping us hire, standing up our Bengaluru presence — including finding and setting up the office — and writing down how we work internally, starting with how we train people and how we promote them. What it means next quarter will be different, and you should want that rather than tolerate it.

This is a hands-on role, not an advisory one. You will schedule the interviews, tour the buildings, chase the vendor, write the first draft of the document, and follow up the fourth time. The judgment matters, but the work is the work.

A successful first year looks like this: we hire faster because you run the process, there is an office in Bengaluru because you found it, a new joiner can be trained from something written rather than from someone's memory, and the exec team has stopped worrying about the things you own.

Responsibilities

Help us hire

- Run recruiting coordination end to end: scheduling, candidate communication, keeping every role's pipeline current and honest.
- Keep candidates informed. We tell people where they stand at every step, and that promise is kept by whoever owns the process — which will be you.
- Watch where the process leaks — where candidates go quiet, where a stage sits too long — and bring the fix, not just the observation.

Stand up Bengaluru

- Own the project to find, negotiate and set up our Bengaluru office: shortlist, visits, commercials, fit-out, vendors, and the hundred small things nobody lists in advance.
- Run it like a project with a written plan, a budget,



named owners and dates — and escalate early when one of them is going to slip.
- Be the person on the ground. This is the part of the role that is not remote.

Write down how we work

- Turn our internal processes into documents someone can actually follow, starting with training and promotion.
- Interview the people who do the work before you write anything. A process invented at a desk gets ignored.
- Keep the playbooks alive: every time something breaks or someone asks the same question twice, that goes back into the document.

Take what the exec team needs

- Own the projects that do not have a home yet — research, vendor selection, a report nobody has time to build, a problem that needs someone to go and find out.
- Come back with a recommendation and the reasoning behind it, not just the findings.

Qualifications

- 2+ years in operations, project coordination, recruiting coordination, executive assistance, consulting, or a startup role where the changed every few months.
- Based in Bengaluru, and able to work from an office there. Part of this job is physical.
- Willing to work a schedule with a minimum 4-hour daily overlap with US Eastern time — in practice an afternoon-into-evening IST shift.
- Clear writing in English. A large part of this role is documents other people rely on, and unclear writing becomes someone else's rework.
- Genuinely organised. Not "replies quickly" — organised in the sense that nothing is unowned and nothing is silently late.
- Comfortable being the most junior person in a conversation and still saying the thing that needs saying.

On the title. This is a Chief of Staff role in the sense that you work directly with the exec team on whatever matters most. It is not a senior leadership position and it does not manage people. We have put the band in the posting so nobody discovers that in the final round.

Also practical

- Having set up an office, run an event, or managed vendors and contracts.
- Recruiting or HR operations experience.
- Comfort with AI tools, and a sense of where they help and where they should not be trusted.
- Any experience working with a US-based team.

📌 Chief of Staff (Bengaluru)
🏢 Laya
📍 Bengaluru