Operations Coordinator - Grants, HR & Procurement

Common Sense Robotics is a young startup based in Leuven, Belgium. We build robot systems for "touch labour" tasks in manufacturing industries where the cost of failure is high: aerospace, automotive and construction. Our clients include Safran and Audi. These industries expect every robot decision to be traceable, auditable, and explainable; and we hold our own operations to the same standard.

Behind every reliable robot is a company that runs reliably. Grant deliverables that land on time. Suppliers that get paid. New hires whose contracts, payroll and hardware are ready on day one. Expense reports that would survive an audit. As we grow, we need someone who owns this layer of the company; not as an afterthought, but as a craft.

The Role

You will be the operational backbone of Common Sense Robotics, working directly with the CEO and COO. You keep the administrative machinery of a growing deep tech company running: subsidized R&D projects (EIC, VLAIO, imec), HR administration, finance operations, and procurement of robotics hardware.

This is not a back-office role at a distance from the technology. You will sit in the middle of a small engineering team, and you need to genuinely understand; or want to understand; what an R&D-driven deep tech environment is: long development cycles, regulated customers, hardware that arrives with lead times measured in months, and funding structures with strict reporting obligations. The people who have done this role well in our experience are highly educated, structured coordinators; often with an engineering-adjacent mindset; who enjoy bringing order across multiple projects at once, and who like the directness of a startup where you work straight with the founders and the team, without layers in between.

Concretely, you will:

• Own grant project administration. Track deliverables, deadlines, timesheets, budgets and reporting for our EIC, VLAIO and other subsidized R&D projects. Prepare the documentation so that reviews and audits are a formality, not a fire drill. Coordinate with our grant consultants and project partners.
• Run HR administration. Be the day-to-day contact with our sociaal secretariaat (payroll office): contracts, payroll input, benefits, leave administration, and the practical onboarding of new engineers; from signed offer to working laptop.
• Keep finance operations tight. Collect, scan and process invoices, receipts and expenses; prepare the monthly handover to our accountant; follow up on incoming and outgoing payments; keep our administrative records complete and audit-ready.
• Support procurement of robotics hardware. Request and compare quotes for robot arms, sensors, compute and lab equipment; follow up on orders, lead times, deliveries and customs; keep track of what we own, where it is, and which project it belongs to.
• Bring order to everything else. Office and lab practicalities, insurance, subscriptions, document management, meeting follow-up; the hundred small things that determine whether a scale-up feels professional or chaotic.

You likely have:

• A higher education degree; the field matters less than the mindset. Business, engineering, sciences or law: what counts is that you are comfortable in a technical R&D environment and can hold your own in conversations about project scope, budgets and hardware.
• A few years of experience in project coordination, operations, grant administration or office management; ideally in a startup, scale-up, research institution or engineering firm.
• Familiarity with (or strong willingness to learn) Belgian and European R&D funding instruments: VLAIO development and research projects, EIC Accelerator, Horizon Europe reporting logic.
• Exceptional organisational skills. You build systems, not to-do lists. Deadlines do not surprise you; you surprise deadlines.
• Discretion and precision. You will handle contracts, salaries and financial data. "Approximately correct" is not in your vocabulary.
• Fluent Dutch and professional English; our administration runs in Dutch, our engineering team and customers work in English.
• Comfort with digital tools: you find your way quickly in accounting platforms, HR portals, grant reporting systems and spreadsheets, and you prefer automating a recurring task over repeating it.

Bonus:

• Hands-on experience with EIC or VLAIO project reporting.
• Experience working with a sociaal secretariaat and Belgian payroll administration.
• Experience purchasing technical or lab equipment.
• Prior work in a deep tech, robotics or hardware startup.

Practical:

• Based in Leuven, on-site presence expected (this role lives where the team lives).
• Minimum 50% up to full-time; we are open to the arrangement that fits the right person.
• You report directly to the CEO and COO and work closely with the entire team.

If you recognise yourself in most of this but not every line: apply anyway. We would rather meet a strong organiser who has never seen an EIC report than miss you because of a checklist.

How to apply

We don't review generic CVs. Instead, send us a short application document, written specifically for this role, explaining why you're a good fit; and describe concretely one situation where you brought structure to operational chaos: what you found, what you built, and what changed. Email: [email protected]