TechTonic Justice seeks a Chief of Staff to the President, helping lead a fast-growing nonprofit at the forefront of combating AI-driven harms to low-income communities. This role blends strategic advising, cross-team coordination, and fundraising support to strengthen organizational alignment, expand impact, and enable the President to focus on long-term strategy and external leadership.
About TechTonic Justice, Inc.
Governments, landlords, employers, and other powerful actors use artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, and related technologies to make decisions about how low-income people work, live, learn, and survive. When people are hurt by AI decision-making, they have few places to turn. TechTonic Justice exists to change this. TechTonic Justice fights the ground-level harms AI causes low-income communities. We do this mainly by supporting local justice movements--legal aid organizations, frontline service providers, grassroots organizers, and affected communities--to identify and fight harmful uses of AI. We emphasize a multidimensional advocacy approach that blends litigation, community activation and organizing, public education, and narrative advocacy. We are based in Los Angeles and offer our services nationwide, with emphasis on the South and the West Coast.
Description
Organization: Governments, landlords, employers, and other powerful actors use artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, and related technologies to make decisions about how low-income people work, live, learn, and survive. When people are hurt by AI decision-making, they have few places to turn. TechTonic Justice exists to change this.
TechTonic Justice fights the ground-level harms AI causes low-income communities. We do this mainly by supporting local justice movements--legal aid organizations, frontline service providers, grassroots organizers, and affected communities--to identify and fight harmful uses of AI. We emphasize a multidimensional advocacy approach that blends litigation, community activation and organizing, public education, and narrative advocacy.
We launched in November 2024. We are incorporated in California, are inspired by dozens of collective years of justice work in the U.S. South with an ongoing commitment to the region, have our teammates in several states, offer our services nationwide, and are debuting intensive state-level work in Arkansas and California. The President is based in Los Angeles.
Position Description: This permanent, full-time, exempt Chief of Staff position is fully remote with occasional travel anticipated (~6-9 trips per year). Although candidates may live in any state in the continental U.S. (unfortunately, we cannot hire someone in Hawai’i or Alaska for this role), they should anticipate working a schedule that maximizes availability between 8 am Pacific time and 3 pm Pacific time.
This position will become TTJ’s 11th team member and the 10th added in roughly the last year. Owing to our rapid growth, TTJ’s President is now positioned to turn his focus from establishing vital infrastructural and programmatic foundations towards long-term sustainability, high-level strategy, and consistent thought leadership. The Chief of Staff will provide strategic organizational, project management, and fundraising capacity to free up the President’s time while maintaining the President’s close connection and responsiveness to the team.
While the position will report to and work most closely with TTJ’s President, the Chief of Staff will also coordinate extensively with TTJ’s Operations Director and interface with the entire TTJ team in harmony with our transparent and collaborative culture. Although the Chief of Staff has no formal management authority, the role will exert significant influence within the organization and will gain insights into all aspects of TTJ’s work, thereby opening possibilities for future career growth. As Chief of Staff roles take many shapes, please read the Job Responsibilities section for a fuller description.
Note: While we recognize that strategic and administrative support often overlap and value the latter, we are not looking for traditional administrative support specialists (e.g., executive assistants) for this role. Candidates should focus on their qualifications to fulfill the role’s strategic dimensions.
About the President
TTJs President, Kevin De Liban, is a lawyer by training and worked for over 12 years at Legal Aid of Arkansas (from 2011 to 2024) at all levels of formal authority, starting as a staff attorney, then managing a team of about 8 attorneys and non-attorney advocates, and ending as the director of advocacy for the entire staff of around 50-60 people. While there, he led several campaigns at the leading edges of anti-poverty advocacy, including ending Arkansas’s use of an algorithm to cut in-home care to disabled Medicaid recipients, stopping Arkansas’s implementation of work reporting requirements in Medicaid, and overcoming qualified immunity to hold state officials personally liable for violating constitutional rights. Kevin launched TechTonic Justice in late 2024. Now, roughly a year and a half later, the organization has a team of 10 and an annual budget above $2 million. Kevin has never worked with a dedicated Chief of Staff but has had somewhat analogous relationships in complex litigation with adept attorneys serving as “second chairs” to manage vitally important day-to-day work.
You
Our ideal candidate will demonstrate a profound commitment to social justice, keen analytical skills, an exacting eye for detail, experience absorbing and advancing strategies that others have developed, the ability to learn, understand, and represent positions of other people, the acumen and confidence to inject their own insights and recommendations into existing work, and an approach to relationships that prioritizes discernment, empathy, listening, trust-building, consensus-seeking, and candor. Sitting at the center of different teams and workstreams, the ideal candidate will be energized by dynamic variety and enjoy thinking about how people best move together.
We estimate that it would take a minimum of 5-7 years in a similar capacity to have the experience we envision, but this is not a strict threshold. Candidates with modestly less experience who otherwise meet the qualifications should apply.
No particular substantive subject-area expertise is required. However, there are various characteristics that are likely advantageous, including experience in anti-poverty work, familiarity working with lawyers or organizers in a social justice setting, and familiarity with the legal aid, access to justice, or tech justice fields.
Degree Requirements
There are no specific degree requirements, but the position requires analytical and writing skills that are traditionally honed through writing-intensive academic coursework, often at the graduate level. People who have developed the necessary skills through alternative paths are encouraged to apply.
Job Responsibilities
The Chief of Staff’s work will involve three overarching functions:
1. Support the President on Fundraising and Relationship Management. The Chief of Staff will support the President to continue institutional fundraising and branch out into individual donor efforts. To this end, job responsibilities include, but are not limited, to:
- Mapping the President’s existing relationships, analyzing gaps, devising ways to fill those gaps, and facilitating opportunities to do so, with an eye towards growing our individual donor base
- Providing background research, context, and logistics (including scheduling and travel arrangements) for meetings, conferences, or other opportunities to develop relationships
- Understanding various ecosystems we move in and identifying strategic opportunities to amplify TTJ’s work, thought leadership, and visibility in ways that foster relationships with new audiences
- Drafting concept notes, funding proposals, presentations, project budgets, and grant reports in collaboration with relevant teammates
- Ensuring programmatic alignment with our strategic plans, grant deliverables, and other funding requirements
2. Serve as the President’s Liaison to the TTJ Team. As the President’s focus transitions, the Chief of Staff will serve as the President’s liaison to every part of the TTJ team to understand their priorities, their work, and their needs. In collaboration with the President, the Chief of Staff will facilitate coordination, information exchange, and harmony across advocacy approaches and priorities. To this end, job responsibilities include, but are not limited to:
- Understanding each team member’s role in TTJ’s work and in the broader ecosystem and fostering creativity, effectiveness, and alignment
- Attending meetings, doing prep work, taking notes, and reporting out
- Creating mechanisms to share information and gather team feedback
- Identifying opportunities to bolster organizational cohesion and work satisfaction
- Informing and participating in hiring strategies, processes, and decisions
- Keeping the President appropriately informed so he can aptly manage and communicate about our work internally and externally
- Understanding the team’s ideas, wants, or needs, elevating priority issues to the President’s attention, and facilitating the President’s responsiveness
- In tandem with TTJ’s Operations Director, supporting the President’s interactions with the Board of Directors by, among other things, arranging logistics, preparing agendas and board materials, supporting Board development and expansion, and liaising with committees
3. Augment TTJ’s Project Management Capacity. Presently, the President works closely with TTJ’s Operations Director for significant projects implicating our organizational infrastructure, such as hiring, internal policy development, and adoption of new platforms to track work or make financial projections. The Chief of Staff will coordinate with the Operations Director to ensure the President can step away from day-to-day project management while still providing needed direction. To this end, job responsibilities include, but are not limited to:
- Shepherding projects from conception to implementation in a way that incorporates the team, often working with outside consultants. Anticipated early projects to shepherd include a major website redesign, a salary study and the corresponding development of a compensation policy, and managing various aspects of design and layout for TTJ’s public-facing work product.
- Facilitating project management best-practices in TTJ’s programmatic work to ensure that we have clear project roles, lines of communication, deadlines, and inter-department information-sharing practices
- Integrating project management practices with technological infrastructure
Job Requirements
- Extensive experience directly supporting a nonprofit or government executive (CEO, president, executive director, or other executive-level position) as a chief of staff or in a similar strategic advisory role
Note: We estimate that it would take a minimum of 5-7 years in a similar capacity to have the experience we envision, but this is not a strict threshold. Candidates with modestly less experience who otherwise meet the qualifications should apply.
- A deep understanding of the nonprofit sector and nonprofit operations, including funding sources, fundraising practices, accountability and management practices , information flows, cross-team coordination, and team dynamics
- Extraordinary attention to detail
- Experience absorbing, representing, and advancing nuanced strategies or positions that other people develop
- An approach to relationships that prioritizes discernment, empathy, listening, trust-building, consensus-seeking, and candor
- Keen analytical skills with the ability to quickly develop functional fluency in unfamiliar topics and articulate strengths and weaknesses of various courses of action
- Comfort making high-stakes recommendations and being entrusted to execute high-stakes decisions
- Project management experience applied to organization-wide projects
- The ability to synthesize voluminous information into nuanced, actionable verbal or written summaries
- Excellent analytical and explanatory writing skills
- Independent initiative and the ability to manage several different kinds of work activities concurrently, prioritize appropriately, and deliver quality work on time
- Flexibility to adapt as needed to a fluid environment of a startup nonprofit organization where immediate needs and timelines may shift
- Empathy and righteous fury
- Collaborative spirit, cultural competence, and the skills needed to work affirmingly with diverse teammates, partners, coalition members, and the communities we exist to serve
- Comfort articulating the intersections between poverty, race, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexual orientation, language, age, disability, and related characteristics
- Driver’s license, access to a car, and proximity to a convenient airport for travel
Salary
$110K-$130K, depending on experience. Current budget projections anticipate annual cost-of-living salary increases. Service time raises are anticipated but still to be determined (subject to budget considerations). TechTonic Justice covers mileage, airfare, hotels, meals, and other necessary travel costs associated with this role.
Benefits: The benefits package presently includes (1) 100% of the employee’s platinum-level medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance, (2) 50% of dependents’ medical, dental, and vision, (3) an automatic contribution by TTJ of 4% of annual salary to a Vanguard 403(b) retirement account that vests after one year (employees may also contribute), (4) unlimited paid time off, subject to approval by leadership in accordance with relevant operational considerations, (5) monthly internet reimbursement up to $75, and (6) a professional development fund of $1,500.
Schedule Flexibility
TechTonic Justice will allow flexibility in scheduling regular work hours to fit the successful candidate’s personal situation, including health needs or caregiving responsibilities. This flexibility will be limited by reasonable organizational needs, including sufficient availability for internal and external meetings. With TTJ’s team spread across four time zones and the President located in California, candidates should anticipate working a schedule that maximizes availability between 8 am Pacific time and 3 pm Pacific time (with some flexibility). Candidates should also anticipate regular deviation from scheduled work hours to complete deadline-driven projects.
*** Presently, we do not anticipate offering regular four-day workweeks. ***
To apply
Submit the following via our Careers page by 11:59 p.m. Pacific time on May 17. Applications received after this time will not be considered. Please include the following:
- In lieu of a cover letter, please respond to these questions in the application portal (please, no AI-generated answers):
- Up to 150 words: What specifically about TechTonic Justice’s mission andapproach interest you? How will joining us advance our work and your career development?
- Up to 200 words: Please describe in detail your experience supporting executive-level nonprofit or government leaders, including how your work augmented the executive’s efficacy.
- Up to 150 words: This Chief of Staff role sits at the intersection of leadership, staff, and external stakeholders. What are some significant tension points you’ve encountered in a similar role and how have you navigated them?
- Up to 100 words: Is there other information relevant to your candidacy, including from your resume, that you want to expand on?
- Resume of up to 4 pages
- Writing sample (redacted as needed) of up to 5 pages, plus up to 1 page of explanatory context needed to orient the reader. This can be any relevant type of writing, including, but not limited to, a concept note, grant proposal, policy report, strategy memo, or OpEd. Please submit the writing sample and explanation as a single combined document.
Process
Applications will be reviewed as they come in. The most promising applicants will be selected for a first interview, likely to happen in late May. The most promising interviewees will be selected for a second interview in early-to-mid June. There is a possibility that we will ask candidates to complete a short exercise. We will check references of finalists. We reserve the option to conduct a third round of interviews if necessary. We plan to extend an offer in June with the successful applicant starting in late June or early July. TTJ has an all-staff retreat in late July that we would like the successful candidate to attend if possible.
Accommodations
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to people with disabilities during the application process and after hiring. Please write people@techtonicjustice.org to request any needed accommodations.
Questions
Please submit any questions to people@techtonicjustice.org. Please do not call unless needed for purposes of accommodations.
Be Encouraged to Apply
If you meet many, but not all, of the requirements, please still consider applying or email us to ask about where you fall short.
We encourage applications from Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, women, LGBTQI+ people, people with disabilities, formerly incarcerated people, and people most impacted by systemic injustice.
Employment decisions are made based on qualifications and organizational needs, without regard to race, national origin, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, religion, citizenship status, disability, marital status, veteran status, or any protected characteristic under applicable law.
