Executive Assistant R&D

About the Role:

The Executive Operations partner will work closely with leaders within the R&D organization. This person will be responsible for ensuring successful calendar management, supporting community building and event coordination for leaders as well as collaborating with our ExecOps peers and cross functional teams.

About the Team:

This role serves as the primary partner to 3-4 leaders within the Product Management and Engineering teams. You will be in a key partnership position, helping to drive Gusto forward and scale. You will also be a part of our Executive Operations community and report to our R&D Executive Operations partner.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Expert of ceremonies: strategically partner to prioritize and coordinate the leader’s time. Make sure it aligns with the priorities of the department, plus creating a system of accountability so that the time allocation can evolve and change as needed. The leader’s time should be prioritized in an intentional and deliberate way. Ideally as proactively as possible, not reactively. Responsibilities include calendar management, including all internal and external meetings.
• Meeting enabler: organize, attend, and track minutes plus action items with an eye on making every interaction productive and enjoyable. The magic here is in ensuring the right set of follow-up actions are taken, not all of them, and having the relationships in place to follow-up with the stakeholders 1-1 if necessary.
• Gifted communicator: represent the leaders well through live and asynchronous communication with various internal and external stakeholders.
• Culture carrier and community builder: Embody Gusto Values while planning team onsites, team-building events, and connecting the dots between different parts of the Gusto organization.
• Relationship builder: you’ll be getting to know hundreds of Gusties across the organization, as well as many external individuals. Creating meaningful and memorable interactions should be natural to you, and something that is a source of excitement.
• Travel planner: flights, hotels, transportation, dining, etc.

Here’s what we're looking for:

• 3+ years of direct administrative experience supporting one or more executives or General Managers of a Division. Ideally, the organization the executive managed was 200+ people, and previous EA work involved working with multiple departments in an organization.
• Career EA who loves the profession and wants to stay an EA for the long term.
• Experience organizing (in-person, remote, and hybrid) team events such as an executive offsite.
• Passion and affinity for team and community building.
• Demonstrated ability to organize complex travel schedules.
• Experience coordinating complex meetings involving multiple time zones.
• Experience supporting scheduling with external parties is a plus.
• Organized and detail-oriented. Able to prioritize multiple assignments and stay calm under pressure, creating order out of chaos. The attention to detail bias must be an intrinsic mindset, and it will be connected to a strong desire to optimize and make things better. The ideal candidate will derive tremendous joy from improving something and crafting the details. You should have an allergic reaction to inefficiency.
• Structured Thinking, Structured Mindset. Must have developed a highly structured and efficient means of managing one’s own time, plus have the ability to explain this structure. The foundation should be based on intentional and deliberate prioritization.
• Excellent Communication Skills. Ability to communicate the priorities of the leaders to others inside the organization, whether it is by written verbal, or group communications.
• Confidentiality. Demonstrated ability to maintain complete confidentiality on all business matters, including examples when this resulted in tension.
• Excellence with major productivity suites, especially Google Apps, as well as a demonstrated ability to pick up new tools, evaluate them, weigh the pros/cons, and optimize one’s work style. Should have clear examples of recent productivity tools that were tested out and either kept or disregarded, plus the ability to explain why.
• Natural ability to connect the dots on different ways of communicating and collaborating. The right candidate will have high EQ, read people well, and have a warmth about them when working with people they know well, and also don’t know well. They should put people at ease, especially more junior members of the organization.

Our cash compensation amount for this role is between $87,000 - $100,000/year in Denver and most other major cities, and between $106,000 - $120,000/year for New York & San Francisco. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate location, experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.