Executive Operations R&D

Gusto • Denver, CO;San Francisco, CA • 1m ago

Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs

Operational leverage roles are increasingly visible in mature SaaS organizations, where product and engineering outcomes depend as much on coordination as on code. This Executive Operations R&D position sits alongside senior leaders across Engineering, Product Design, Product Management, and Data, pointing to a multi-discipline R&D model typical of scaled SaaS companies with established operating rhythms and complex stakeholder networks.

For a SaaS career, the durable value here is learning how decisions move through an R&D org: how priorities are translated into calendars, forums, and follow-through; how cross-functional commitments are tracked; and how communication patterns shape execution. The remit spans meeting architecture, lightweight program management, and selective special projects—experience that maps well to broader SaaS operations paths (e.g., product operations, program management, or chief-of-staff-style roles) because it builds fluency in alignment mechanics rather than a single functional craft.

This role tends to suit an experienced executive assistant or operations partner who prefers structured systems, high discretion, and sustained partnership with a small set of leaders. It also fits someone who enjoys improving workflows, making coordination measurable, and acting as a connective layer across teams without needing formal authority.

The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.

Job Description

About the Role:

The Executive Operations partner will work closely with leaders within the Engineering, Product Design, Product Management, and Data (R&D) organization. This person will be responsible for ensuring the operations of the leaders runs smoothly and that the team has strong practices for coordination, execution, communication, and alignment.

This role serves as the primary partner to 2-3 leaders within the R&D organization. You will be in a key partnership position, helping to drive Gusto forward and scale. You will also be a part of the R&D Executive Operations community and report directly to the lead 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.
Special projects: May include research, analysis, presentation preparation, cross-functional company programs, etc. These projects should be executed with quality, but the goal is not to have them become a large percentage of your time. The Product Services team must maintain time flexibility to adapt to the needs of the organization, ideally in a proactive way (not a reactive way).
Project management: keep multiple teams and projects on track in parallel. Gusto is a 2000+ person organization, and how we do planning and organize cross-functional work requires lots of moving parts at times. You will be a key enabler of things moving smoothly, or recognizing when they’re not and making changes to make it smoother.
Gifted communicator: represents the leaders well through phone, email, and chat with various internal and external stakeholders.
Culture carrier and community builder: Embody Gusto Values while planning team off-sites, 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.

Here’s what we're looking for:

Work Background:

5+ years of direct administrative experience supporting one or more C-Level executives or General Managers of a Division. Ideally, the organization the executive managed was 1,000+ 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.
Demonstrated ability to own large x-functional projects from end to end, ideally with visibility to an executive team and/or board of directors.
Experience organizing (in-person, remote, and hybrid) team events with ~50 Gusties, such as an executive offsite.
Demonstrated ability to organize complex travel schedules with many moving parts, including multiple briefings in one day, managing multiple stakeholders, etc.
Experience supporting scheduling with external parties is a plus.

Characteristics & Skill set:

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.
Intellectual curiosity to discover new ways to make things better. This should manifest as a character trait and include a compulsion to improve things, find new ways of doing things, and drive a desire for lifelong learning. When facing a complex situation, your bias should be to break it down into bite-sized components. Relentless optimization and improvement drives you to learn new things and powers your attention to detail. This requires great memory, and also means that self-improvement is likely a big factor in your life (professionally and personally).
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.
Attributes others will have said about you: constantly learning new things, high attention to detail, great memory, calm under pressure, easy to work with, deliberate & intentional with their actions, precise, level headed, calm and collected, cares about the details, crafts their work.

Our cash compensation amount for this role is $100,000 to $115,000 in Denver & most major metro locations, and $125,000 to $140,000 for San Francisco & New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate location, experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.

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