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About This Role
Chief of Staff to the CEO-AI First Executive Strategic Partner
National Painting Group · Colorado · Full-Time (Hybrid)
I'm Eric, co-founder of National Painting Group, and we hire TOP performers.
You aren't looking for "an executive assistant job." You’ve had those and have the experience, but you are ambitious and you’re looking for a CEO who wants to hand over real ownership, you want a seat close to the strategy and vision, and work that adds to your life instead of draining it.
National Painting Group is growing fast, and I'm redesigning how I lead a large and fast growing organization. I need a badass person who can work closely with me and support this rapid growth so I don’t become the bottleneck for what’s possible.
Keep reading if…
- You're someone who says "I've got it," and then actually does.
- You ask, "what can I take off your plate today?" … and you just do it.
- You're AI-fluent. You build workflows across platforms, well beyond chat and search, and you can show them.
- You love running a lot of projects, you’re highly organized, and thrive creating organization from chaos.
- You know how to think like a leader. You understand why a CEO's priorities are what they are, and you protect them… including the well-being of the CEO.
- You're ambitious, financially and in life. You have big goals and you're going after them.
- You want your work to add to your life, not take from it.
- You want to love where you work: the work itself, the people, and what the company stands for.
- You want to be empowered and given room to perform, because you love to perform. You don't want to be micromanaged.
- You're coachable, and welcome feedback - and you can take feedback without taking it personal.
- You're hungry to learn, grow and develop, as a professional and as a person.
Still with me?
What it's like to work here
Autonomy. We're all adults, we're high performers, and we all have a job to do. We trust each other to do our jobs, and you won't be micromanaged. This is a culture of universal accountability, not hierarchy. We are accountable individually and collectively.
High performance. When you work here, you're surrounded by high performers, and we expect the same from you.
Investment in your development. We produce exceptional results by investing heavily in our people through ongoing internal training and development. It goes beyond training you in your role: it develops you as someone who creates and fulfills intentions, and it shows up in your entire life.
Performance, not hours. We believe your work should add to your life, not take from it. We don't do hustle culture or 60-hour workweeks. You can perform at a high level without sacrificing your personal life, and we've found that's exactly what unlocks performance. You should be able to conduct this role at a high level while fulfilling everything else that’s important to you in your life. We’ll help you do that.
Clarity of intention & alignment. Everyone you work with is clear on the objective, how we operate, where we're going, and the future we're committed to.
Strategy & patience. We have a clear plan, and we don't take shortcuts. Impeccable, thoughtful work is the source of our increasingly rapid growth.
About National Painting Group
We're a family of companies. National Painting Group co-owns 15 painting companies across the country with 8+ acquisitions in process right now - and more on the way. Our model companies, Foothills Painting and Elk Horn Painting (Inc. 5000 in 2024 and 2025), are where every playbook is proven before it gets rolled out to all of our portfolio companies. At Painting Business Pro, we have coached 3,000+ painting company owners since 2013, and, currently, all of our partnership acquisitions come from that community.
Most painting contractors are excellent at the craft and were never taught the business. We've spent more than a decade building those systems inside our own companies.
Our ultimate intention (mission) is: Discover what's possible and joyously make it happen. We're here to help our people build a wildly successful and fulfilling career, and we're at an inflection point of significant growth. That's why we need you.
The Big Picture
Painting Business Pro is the largest and longest-running coaching program for painting contractors, with over 500 active members. We've grown that business by 500% over the last three years, and we expect that trend to continue for the next three years.
National Painting Group is our portfolio of painting companies, where we buy a minority stake in painting companies, grow them, and then help the partner ultimately exit, where we take over a majority stake of the business. We currently have 15 painting companies in our portfolio, 8 more in due diligence, and we expect to bring on 1 to 2 new partners every month in 2027.
But we also have plans beyond the painting industry. A lot of our core competencies, what makes us unique, and what we're building apply to business far beyond the painting industry.
Painting Business Pro, National Painting Group and what comes next all run through my calendar today. I can’t run fast enough to keep up with the growth that is happening and I’m in the process of completely reimagining how I run and lead this company - and a big part of that is this role.
Requirements
The Role
This is an operate-and-build role. You'll take over my executive support on day one, then build the AI workflows, project system and meeting rhythm that let you act on my behalf. You'll sit alongside me, learn how I think, and earn the authority to act for me.
You'll be the person:
- Being my strategic partner. Guard my time and energy. Decide which meetings happen, get shortened or move. Prepare every call so the intention is set and it's worth having. Be my eyes and ears on new-leader onboarding and 90-day plans.
- Running project management & accountability. Own the system for everything I own and assign, with clear owners, KPIs, deadlines and visible progress across my leadership team.
- Owning AI-first executive support. Inbox, calendar, travel, expenses, documents and vendors. Route email into meetings or task blocks, get clarity before anything reaches me, and build the workflows that keep this to 10 hours a week or less.
- Handling personal logistics. Mainly trips and vacations. This is a very small part of the role but needed.
- Running the rhythm around it all. Prep and follow-up for team meetings and group calls of 50–100 people, podcast and filming schedules, the alignment rhythm around our BlüPrint, and NPG's six annual events of 50–200 people. Let me do the stuff only I can do and support the scaled distribution of everything I’m building and creating internally and externally.
- Give me my time back. In your first 30 days, own email, calendar, logins and payments, meet every leader, and ship your first AI workflows. By day 90, 10+ hours a week back to me. By month 12, you act on my behalf in meetings and routine replies, run accountability from a live dashboard, and run our events from a playbook you built. This is a rough expectation and we’ll work together to expand the role as you’re ready for the next step into more accountability.
You'll work side by side with me and coordinate across our team, and your authority grows step by step: from "do what I ask" to an extension of me.
About You
- You have 5–7 years supporting a CEO or founder, owning their inbox, calendar and the decisions inside them. This is required.
- You've built AI workflows across platforms (Zapier, Make, n8n, Claude, ChatGPT or similar) and you can demo them, with the hours they saved.
- You've run many projects at once with KPIs, owners and deadlines, and you've held a team to its commitments.
- You understand business strategy at a high level and use sound judgment to guide and protect a CEO's priorities.
- You write clearly, including in someone else's voice, and your discretion is absolute.
- You're an A player: highly organized, quick, decisive and proactive. You love to perform at a high level - it’s fulfilling for you to kick ass.
Nice to have: event coordination, from 5–15 person team days to 200-person events.
Not required: home-services experience or a degree. Many great candidates come from senior Executive Business Partner or strategic EA roles with a founder or CEO, or an early Chief of Staff seat that's still hands-on.
Benefits
Compensation & Benefits
- Base salary: $125,000–$150,000, depending on experience and track record.
- Performance bonus: 10–15% of base, tied to your 90-day and 12-month outcomes.
- Tech stipend: Open to discussion (Approx. $100-$150 p/mo)
- Health insurance: We offer various Medical, Dental, Vision programs, and contribute up to $400 p/month towards your selection.
- Unlimited PTO. You read that right. Unlimited. We hire high-accountability folks and top performers; you balance your time, and we encourage you to take the time you need, when you need it. You need to fulfill your accountabilities and as long as you’re doing that, you can work whenever you want.
- Training & Development: We invest in you. Our first-in-class training & development programs foster personal & professional growth, and you'll have an all-access pass.
- The real benefit: a balanced work culture where you do meaningful work with people you respect and work alongside a founder who plans life alongside the business, without the sacrifice a role like this usually demands.
Location: Hybrid, based in Colorado. You'll rarely need to be in person day to day; you'll travel with me occasionally (under 10%) and join us in person for events, filming days and team days. Otherwise, work where you work best. This is a full-time role and your sole focus. You can expect to be in Fort Collins, Colorado 1-5 days a month for events or in person team meetings.
How to Apply
Please submit all three:
- Your resume
- A short cover letter: why National Painting Group, and why this role
- A 1–2 minute video: you, on camera, telling us why you'd be a great fit
For a Chief of Staff, that video is also a work sample: show us how you communicate, clearly and concisely. We won't consider applications without all three.
What to Expect After You Apply
This is an important role, and we're highly selective. Because we expect a lot of interest, we'll only reach out to the candidates we're moving forward with.
Your first step is a phone conversation with Vivian, who leads talent for our organization. Strong candidates then record short video answers to three questions about the role. From there, strong candidates move to a conversation with me, including a walk through our company, mission, vision, values, and how we work… And then through the rest of our process, which includes meeting several members of our team (we've found that to be one of the most important steps).
We move fast, because speed matters with the right people. If we're moving forward, you'll hear from us within 24 hours. If you don't, it means we didn't see the right fit this time, and we wish you the best in your search.
Job Type: Full-time Location: Hybrid — Colorado Apply by: November 30, 2026
Salary Context
This $125K-$150K range is in the lower quartile for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $178K across 2239 roles with salary data).
View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 11,520 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 76% of the market. At National Painting Group, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills Required
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $212,040 based on 13,780 positions with disclosed compensation. C-Level-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $250,000. This role's midpoint ($137K) sits 35% below the category median. Disclosed range: $125K to $150K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,480. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,000. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($266,050) and AI Engineering Manager ($253,461). By seniority level: Entry: $112,320; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $230,000; Director: $272,250; VP: $235,830.
National Painting Group AI Hiring
National Painting Group has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in Fort Collins, CO, US. Compensation range: $150K - $150K.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 6% (708 positions) offer remote work, while 10,737 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (3,257 roles, $221,000 median); San Francisco (2,766 roles, $260,550 median); Los Angeles (1,580 roles, $210,000 median).
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 11,520 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 140 entry-level, 5,630 mid-level, 4,176 senior, and 1,574 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (708 positions). The remaining 10,737 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $213,480. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,000. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($266,050 median, 70 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($253,461 median, 58 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 476 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 11,520 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (8,769), AI Software Engineer (586), AI Product Manager (511). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (140) are outnumbered by mid-level (5,630) and senior (4,176) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 1,574 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (708 positions), with 10,737 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $213,480. Top-quartile roles start at $264,000, and the 90th percentile reaches $318,400. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Safety roles lead at $266,050 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $140,000. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (2,267 postings), Aws (1,178 postings), Azure (972 postings), Rag (924 postings), Gcp (715 postings), Pytorch (586 postings), Claude (572 postings), Kubernetes (559 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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