Office Operations & Recruiting Coordinator - 100%

Office Operations & Recruiting Coordinator - 100% Are you the person who walks into an office, a hiring pipeline, or a founder’s calendar and makes it run better within a week? At Lightium, we’re building the next generation of photonic integrated circuits to help AI infrastructure run faster. As we scale past 30 team members, we’re looking for an immediate Office Operations & Recruiting Coordinator to sit at the heart of the company: driving our hiring execution, running our company events, and keeping our team moving, with the proactiveness and organization to take it all by storm. Position Summary This is a central operating role. You own the processes behind our hiring and onboarding execution, our company events, and our team’s day-to-day activities, and you make them better as you go. You're not just running what exists; your sharpness makes you spot inefficiencies, and your proactiveness lets you fix them without being asked. Execution is the core of the job, but we want someone who treats every process as a draft that can improve, not a script to follow. Key Responsibilities Hiring Execution & Recruiting Operations: Own our applicant tracking system (ATS) end-to-end: post roles, maintain pipeline hygiene, and keep every hiring manager’s process organized. Plan hiring needs and timelines together with hiring managers, then run the process: candidate communication, interview scheduling, and moving candidates through the pipeline stage by stage. Organize travel and logistics for candidates coming from abroad. Manage employment contracts and act as the point of contact with our immigration lawyers to keep work permit applications on track. Own onboarding processes so every new hire has equipment, access, and a clear first day. Develop and improve written procedures for our employee journey. Take ownership of our HR related software (Factorial), people folders, and people statistics. Executive Assistance: Manage emails and calendars for the Executive team. Triage and manage their inboxes, flagging what needs their attention and handling or drafting responses to the rest. Prepare and organize meetings, keep them on top of recurring commitments, and handle ad hoc administrative requests. Support and organize travel logistics for our external guests and visitors, such as investors, customers, and key partners. Company Events: Plan and run our monthly town halls, quarterly company events, and annual retreat, including venue sourcing, budgeting, vendor coordination, logistics, and on-the-day execution. Build a repeatable playbook so events get easier to run as the team grows. Maintain the conference and tradeshow calendar, including booking hotels, supporting logistics, and tracking deadlines. Office Management: Take pride in making the office a place the team genuinely enjoys coming to. Maintain and improve office-related processes and guidelines. Take ownership of employee birthday gifts. Manage vendor relationships (cleaning, IT, facilities, supplies), keep the space stocked and functional without being asked, and solve problems before they become apparent. What You’ll Bring Experience: 3–5+ years in office management, executive operations, executive/administrative assistance, or recruiting coordination, ideally in a fast-growing startup or scale-up environment. Organization: Exceptional organizational discipline paired with real energy and drive. You anticipate what’s needed before you’re asked, you track every open item across hiring, events, and team schedules, and you push things forward rather than waiting for them to come to you. Eye for detail and a craving for documentation and procedure building. Adaptability: Comfortable operating in a fast-paced environment where processes are still being built, and happy to build and improve them as you go. Discretion: You handle sensitive information, contracts, immigration matters, candidate data, and execs’ schedules with judgment and confidentiality. Tools: Comfortable working across an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), Microsoft 365, calendar, and travel-booking tools. Proficiency with AI (Claude) more than welcome. You pick up new systems quickly. Language Skills: Fluency in English is required. German is a strong plus for local administrative and immigration coordination. What We Offer A high-trust, high-autonomy role where you own the operational backbone of a fast-growing deep tech company, with visible impact from day one. Competitive compensation and benefits package , reflective of your experience and expertise, including an employee stock option plan (ESOP), fully-covered Pillar Two, and generous vacation. A seat close to the founders in an early-phase startup , with real opportunity to shape how the company scales and to grow your own role as we do. Final Thoughts We'd love to hear from you if you're passionate about building new tech from the ground up and thrive in a collaborative and result-driven environment. Become a key player in an early-phase startup and join a motivated, and energetic team. You will have the unique opportunity to create, grow, and develop your professional skills at a fast pace. Lightium is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. Locations Zürich Remote status Hybrid About Lightium AG Just as silicon chips reshaped electronics, Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs) are poised to revolutionize how we process, store, and transmit data. As data creation and consumption explode, transmission speeds struggle to keep up. We are proud to be Europe’s first company to offer a high-volume, production-grade foundry platform based on our proprietary thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) technology. This material outperforms traditional silicon photonics in speed, power efficiency, and overall performance. We are positioned at the forefront of photonics, enabling ultra-high speeds for our connected world.