Chief Operating Officer
Own the machine. The CEO sells the future; you make sure it ships, lands and renews. A founding COO role at the point where a platform becomes a business.
Where the platform becomes a business
Lima Xi has a working platform, a founding team with deep operating pedigree, and a seed round in motion. What comes next is the harder part: turning design partner conversations into pilots, pilots into contracts, and contracts into a repeatable delivery motion that does not depend on any one founder being in the room.
That is this role. You will own day-to-day operations, customer delivery, and the internal rhythm that keeps a fast-moving company from tripping over itself. You will work alongside the CEO, CTO and CFO as the operational counterweight to a commercially aggressive plan.
This is a builder's role, not a caretaker's. There is very little process today. You will design it, and you will do a lot of the work yourself before you hire anyone to help.
Company leadership
The mandate
01Customer delivery & success
- Own the design partner and pilot programme end to end — onboarding, cadence, outcomes
- Build the delivery motion: how a new customer goes from signed to seeing value
- Establish success metrics per engagement and hold the business to them
- Turn pilot learnings into product and commercial feedback the team can act on
02Operations & process
- Design the operating rhythm — planning cycles, reviews, decision logs, accountability
- Build the systems and tooling the team runs on, without over-engineering them
- Own vendor relationships, procurement and operational spend alongside the CFO
- Identify where the business is losing time and remove the cause, not the symptom
03People & scaling
- Own hiring operations as the team grows through and beyond Series A
- Build onboarding that gets new people productive quickly in a distributed team
- Set the standard for how work gets documented, handed over and shipped
- Partner with the CEO on org design as functions emerge
04Commercial operations
- Support the CEO on pricing execution, contracting and commercial documentation
- Own the handoff from commercial conversation to delivered engagement
- Build the reporting that tells leadership what is actually happening, weekly
What we're looking for
Essential
- Proven operating leadership at a growth-stage company — COO, VP Operations or equivalent
- Experience building process where none existed, at a company under 50 people
- Track record delivering enterprise customer engagements, not just internal projects
- Comfortable owning numbers — utilisation, delivery cost, cycle time, renewal
- Strong English; Mandarin, Cantonese or Thai a genuine advantage
Domain fit
- Exposure to logistics, aviation, supply chain or enterprise SaaS delivery
- Understanding of how large, slow-moving enterprise customers actually buy and onboard
- Experience operating across multiple jurisdictions or a distributed team
- Familiarity with Asia-Pacific business practice and pace
Character
- Bias to action — you would rather ship something imperfect than plan something perfect
- Low ego and high ownership; you do the unglamorous work without being asked
- Calm operator — the person who gets steadier as things get busier
- Direct communicator who surfaces problems early rather than managing appearances
- Comfortable being the person who says no when the plan does not add up
A genuine plus
- Prior founding or early-employee experience at a startup that scaled
- Experience standing up a customer success or professional services function
- Familiarity with AI tooling and automation to keep headcount lean
- Board or investor reporting exposure
Founding COO at the inflection point
Most COO roles inherit a machine. This one builds it. You will define how Lima Xi delivers, and that definition will still be visible in the company five years from now.
- Founding equity — you own a share of what you build
- A seat at the leadership table alongside experienced founders, not a layer below it
- Direct influence on product priorities through real customer delivery feedback
- Exposure to global airlines, forwarders and institutional investors
- Hong Kong base with remote-friendly flexibility and a distributed team across Asia
- Clear Series A milestone at Month 18 — operational credibility is central to getting there
Before you apply
How is this different from the Chief of Staff role?
The Chief of Staff is founder-facing and outward-looking, weighted toward strategy, investor work and leverage. The COO owns the internal machine: delivery, process, hiring operations and the operating rhythm. They are complementary, not overlapping.
How large is the team today?
Small and senior. This is a founding leadership hire — you will be building the operational function largely yourself before hiring into it.
Is there an existing delivery process?
Very little. Design partner engagements are running, but the repeatable motion has not been built. That is the first order of business.
Where is the role based?
Hong Kong, China, on a remote-friendly basis, working with a distributed team across Hong Kong and other Asia-Pacific locations.
Send it to careers@limaxi.io
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