Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Executive Operations roles inside R&D are a specific kind of SaaS lever: they shape how product, engineering, design, and data leaders translate strategy into shipped work. This listing is notable for positioning the function as an operational partner across multiple senior stakeholders, with an explicit tie to AI-enabled ways of working. In a mature SaaS organization, that combination often sits close to the mechanisms that keep roadmaps, prioritization, and decision forums coherent at scale.
For a SaaS career, the value here is exposure to the operating system behind product development rather than a single domain project. The work spans cadence design, cross-functional coordination, and executive communication, all of which are portable across SaaS companies that run on recurring delivery and continuous iteration. The emphasis on structured thinking and tooling fluency also aligns with how modern SaaS teams increasingly measure and improve their own throughput.
This role fits professionals who prefer being a force multiplier and who take satisfaction in making complex systems run predictably. It will suit someone comfortable switching between meticulous execution and light analytical work, and who enjoys building trust across many teams while handling sensitive context with discretion.
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 leaders' operations run smoothly and that the team has strong practices in coordination, execution, communication, and alignment.
About the Team:
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 drive Gusto's growth and scale by leveraging AI to accelerate that work. 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 department's priorities and creates a system of accountability so the time allocation can evolve as needed. The leader’s time should be prioritized intentionally and deliberately. Ideally, proactively, not reactively. Responsibilities include calendar management, including all internal and external meetings.
- Meeting enabler: Organize, attend, and track minutes and action items, with an eye toward making every interaction productive and enjoyable. The magic here is in ensuring the right set of follow-up actions is taken, not all of them, and having the relationships in place to follow up with the stakeholders 1-1 if necessary.
- Special projects: Apply AI-driven research, analysis, presentation preparation, and cross-functional company programs. These projects should be executed by leveraging AI and ensuring a high-quality bar. The goal is not for them to take up a large percentage of your time.
- Project management: Keep multiple teams and projects on track in parallel. Gusto is a 2,000+-person organization, and the way we plan and organize cross-functional work involves 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.
- Travel planner: Flights, hotels, transportation, dining, etc.
Here’s what we're looking for:
- C-suite or division GM support. 5+ years of direct administrative experience supporting C-Level executives or General Managers at organizations of 1,000+ people, with previous EA work that spanned multiple departments.
- Career EA. You love the profession and want to stay in it for the long term.
- Cross-functional project ownership. Demonstrated ability to own large projects end to end, ideally with visibility to an executive team and/or board of directors.
- Event organization. Experience planning in-person, remote, and hybrid team events for large groups including executive offsites.
- Complex travel management. Proven ability to organize intricate travel schedules with multiple stakeholders, back-to-back briefings, and many moving parts.
- 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 is linked to a strong desire to optimize and improve. The ideal candidate will derive tremendous joy from improving something and crafting the details. You should have an allergic reaction to inefficiency.
- Structured thinking and 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 built on intentional, deliberate prioritization.
- Intellectual curiosity to discover new ways to make things better. This should manifest as a character trait, with a compulsion to improve things, find new ways to do them, and 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 drive you to learn new things and power 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.
- Strong fluency with Google Workspace, Claude, and other AI productivity tools, paired with genuine curiosity for new ones. You should be comfortable kicking the tires on a new tool, weighing the tradeoffs, and either folding it into your workflow or moving on. Come ready with recent examples of tools you've tried, what you kept, what you ditched, and 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 warmth when working with people they know well and those they don’t. 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 $102,555 to $126,485 in Denver & most major metro locations, and $123,830 to $152,724 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.
