Strategy Manager, Office of the CEO

Team: Office of the CEO
Reports to: Founder & CEO
Location: Sawtelle, Los Angeles, CA (onsite, five days per week)
Employment type: Full-time, salaried, exempt
Base salary: $150,000 to $180,000, plus equity

Plug's Founder & CEO needs someone who can take the company's most important open questions (where to grow, what the numbers are really saying, whether an opportunity is worth pursuing) and come back with the analysis, a recommendation, and a plan to execute it. This is an analytical role first. It is not an administrative Chief of Staff, EA, or PMO role.

About Plug

Plug is an automotive fintech startup building the marketplace for electric vehicles. Consumers, dealers, and commercial partners trade in, sell, and auction used EVs through a platform built exclusively for electric, with nothing adapted from legacy automotive.

Consumers get an instant cash offer in minutes, backed by data-driven pricing and battery state-of-health analysis, with pickup, payment, and title transfer handled end to end. Franchise and independent dealers across the United States bid in real time on inventory sourced directly from consumers, dealers, and commercial partners. The result is a single platform that gives sellers a fast, fair exit and gives dealers a dedicated channel for sourcing used EV inventory.

Founded in 2023 and led by former Tesla executives, Plug has facilitated $150M in EV sales since launch and is backed by a $20M Series A from Lightspeed Venture Partners. We're building the most AI-native startup team in Los Angeles: operators, engineers, and ML researchers laying the transaction rails for the used EV market's exponential growth.

Why this role

As Plug grows, the number of priorities competing for the CEO's attention is growing with it. Many of the most important ones don't sit neatly inside one function: a marketplace economics question, a new market to evaluate, a board discussion that needs a sharper answer, a strategic tradeoff with incomplete data.

You'll own that work. You'll take a loosely defined problem, structure it, get to the data, form a point of view, and drive it to a decision and then to execution. You'll work directly with the Founder & CEO and across Plug's leadership team.

Your mission

Take important, ambiguous problems off the CEO's plate and come back with a better answer than he'd have gotten by doing the work himself. Then make sure it gets done.

What you will own

Business analysis and recommendations. Own the CEO's hardest analytical questions: marketplace liquidity, unit economics, pricing, growth, and customer behavior. Form hypotheses, pull and pressure-test the data yourself, and land on a recommendation with clear tradeoffs.

CEO strategic projects. Lead high-priority, cross-functional projects end to end. Define the problem, structure the work, drive to a decision, and hand off or execute.

New opportunities and business cases. Size markets and evaluate new products, segments, and partnerships. Build the model and the business case, and tell the CEO whether it's worth pursuing and why.

Market and competitive intelligence. Track EV, automotive retail, and fintech dynamics and competitors. Distill them into implications for Plug, not summaries.

Board, investor, and fundraising materials. Own the analysis and narrative behind board decks, investor updates, and fundraising materials. Gather inputs across the company and turn them into a clear, defensible story.

AI-native execution. Use AI aggressively for research, analysis, synthesis, drafting, and workflow automation. We're looking for someone who naturally asks, "How can I do this faster and better?" before adding process or headcount.

Driving CEO priorities to completion. Once a decision is made, make sure it happens. Turn CEO and leadership-team decisions into clear owners and next steps, and keep the handful of priorities that matter most moving. The subject matter will change as the company grows.

Continuous improvement. Look for friction in how we make decisions and get work done. Identify what's slow, manual, repetitive, or no longer serving us, and fix it with data, AI, automation, or simply a better way of working. Don't preserve a process because "that's how we've always done it."

What success looks like after 12 months

• You've led several CEO-sponsored projects from question to decision to execution, and at least one has materially changed a Plug decision on pricing, market entry, or resource allocation.

• The CEO hands you ambiguous questions without a detailed brief and trusts what comes back.

• You own the analytical backbone of board and investor materials. The CEO edits; he doesn't draft.

• You've surfaced at least one problem or opportunity nobody asked you to look at.

• You've replaced at least one slow, manual workflow with a faster, better one.

• The CEO and leadership team see you as the person to hand their most important, ambiguous work to.

What we need from you

• 3 to 6 years in a role where your analysis drove real decisions: management consulting, investment banking, PE/VC, strategic finance, corporate strategy, founder's associate, or a high-ownership analytical role at a startup. What you owned matters more than where you worked.

• Structured problem solving. You can take an ambiguous question, break it into pieces, figure out what information matters, and reach a conclusion.

• Business judgment. You form a point of view rather than presenting a list of options, and you can make a recommendation with incomplete information.

• Comfort with data. You don't need to be a data scientist, but you can interrogate numbers, use BI tools, and recognize when something doesn't make sense.

• Excellent written communication. You can turn messy information into a concise memo or a clear CEO- or board-level presentation.

• Strong Excel modeling skills.

• High ownership. You don't wait for someone to give you every step.

• Constructive challenge. You're comfortable working directly with senior executives and pushing back when the data says something different.

• Follow-through. You'll do the unglamorous work required to get something across the finish line.

• Real AI usage. You can point to specific ways AI has changed how you research, model, or write, not just that you use it.

Nice to have

• Experience at an early-stage or high-growth technology company

• Marketplace, automotive, fintech, mobility, or consumer technology experience

• Experience preparing board, investor, or fundraising materials

• Market sizing and competitive analysis

• SQL

How we operate

We hire builders who value ownership, velocity, curiosity, and measurable outcomes. We move quickly, decide with data, and treat AI as a core operating principle.

The people who do well here scope their own work, run their own process, and keep several workstreams moving without being managed closely. They're comfortable with complexity and ambiguity and can take a partly defined problem and come back with a plan.

This role tracks the CEO's pace. Expect frequent evening and weekend work, particularly around board meetings, fundraising, and high-priority projects.

High agency. Low ego. Bias for action.

Why Plug

• You'll work directly with the Founder & CEO on the company's highest-priority problems: strategy, board discussions, investors, new opportunities, and marketplace economics.

• You'll get exposure across the business rather than sitting inside one function.

• You'll have real ownership and a direct line to company outcomes.

• You'll work alongside operators who have scaled multi-billion-dollar businesses in automotive, EV, and marketplaces.

• You'll be part of an AI-native company that's rethinking how work gets done.

Not sure you should apply? Do it.

Research consistently shows that people from under-represented groups are more likely to talk themselves out of applying if they don't meet 100% of the listed requirements. You don't need to check every box. If this role excites you and you bring most of what's listed under "What we need from you," we want to hear from you.

Compensation and Benefits

Base salary: $150,000 to $180,000, plus equity

Salary ranges reflect independent, third-party benchmarking against national compensation data. Where an individual's offer falls within the range depends on relevant experience, skills, qualifications, business needs, and market conditions. Ranges are reviewed periodically and may be adjusted.

• Health, vision, and dental insurance

• 401(k) plan

• Daily lunch and dinner stipend

• Equity

• Unlimited PTO

• Fully stocked kitchen

• Dog-friendly office

• On-site EV charging

This full-time position is based in Sawtelle (between Santa Monica and West Los Angeles) and is in person five days per week. We welcome candidates from all locations who are willing to relocate; relocation assistance is available. Visa sponsorship is not available at this time.

Equal Opportunity

Plug is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, national origin, ancestry, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, pregnancy, age, marital status, military or veteran status, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law. We believe diverse teams build better products.

Plug will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records in accordance with the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring and the California Fair Chance Act.