Executive Assistant

This is the role for an EA who finds genuine satisfaction in being the reason everything stands up. You’ll support the CEO to start, with 1-2 additional executives added as the company grows.

Every hour the CEO spends on the wrong thing is an hour we are not winning. Your job is to find and eliminate time leakage: every 10-minute context switch, every meeting that should have been a Slack, every back-and-forth that ate a Tuesday morning. You read the subtext in a customer email and know whether it needs a same-day response or a thoughtful 24-hour one. You can tell when a leader needs 30 minutes of unscheduled thinking time and protect it without being asked. Calendar Tetris is your sport.

What you’ll do

Protect the CEO’s time strategically without being a rigid gatekeeper (this is the job)

Own a complex CEO calendar across multiple time zones, with more execs added over time

Eliminate time leakage: kill meetings that don’t need to happen, shorten the ones that do, batch the rest

Make tradeoff calls on competing requests without escalating every one

Build a calendar that reflects real priorities, not just whoever asked loudest

Protect deep work blocks like they’re customer meetings

Build automations where you can: we rely on everyone at the company to work smart with the best available tools

External communications

Be the front door for customers, investors, partners, and candidates reaching the CEO

Customers come first here; their requests get triaged with that bias and never sit

Draft and send emails on behalf of the CEO

Triage inbound: ruthlessly prioritize what gets a fast reply, what gets a holding message, what gets escalated, what waits

Handle confidential conversations (board, fundraising, hiring, customer issues) with the discretion the role demands

Travel and operations

Plan domestic and occasional international travel: flights, hotels, ground, agendas, expense reconciliation

Coordinate trips to customer sites, which often means jobsite visits, regional AEC offices, and industry conferences (AIA, ENR events, AEC tech summits)

Run offsites, dinners, and customer visits in San Diego and on the road

Life admin

Help the people you support keep their lives running so they can keep the company running

The judgment to know when a personal thing is blocking work and to handle it before anyone asks

Backup project work

Occasionally pick up a discrete project end-to-end when it lands between functions

Early-stage means some weeks you’ll help close a vendor contract, run point on an offsite, or unblock something for recruiting or HR

The smallest part of the job by design, but real

What you’ve done

3-5+ years supporting founders or senior executives, ideally at a startup or fast-moving tech company

You’ve supported a high-output executive in a fast environment and you kept up

You’ve planned real travel, not just booked a flight; you know what to do when the 6am to JFK cancels at 4am

You write well.

You’ve held confidential information and never been the leak

Comfortable in Google Workspace, Slack, and whatever new tool we throw at you next month

What makes someone great here

You over-communicate by default and never make people wonder what’s happening

You ask “why” before you ask “how”: understand the goal, then build the plan

You don’t wait for a process to exist before you can use one; you build the process

Nothing falls through the cracks on your watch

You bring up problems with a proposed answer attached

You feel a customer’s urgency the same way the CEO does

Curious about AEC or excited to learn it; this industry rewards people who actually engage with how things get built

Startup experience is a plus, AEC experience is a bigger plus, neither is required if you can show the judgment