Senior Executive Assistant

Job Title

Who We're Looking For

You love getting shit done, and you're up for literally anything. You're the COO's right hand, and whatever gets thrown at you, you figure out how to make it work. One month that might mean rebuilding how the company hires and onboards people, the next it's automating a reporting process no one's had time to fix, the next it's pulling together an offsite in two weeks. You don't need a fixed lane. You build one wherever the company needs it most right now.You think in systems, not job descriptions. Calendars, people process, internal tooling, budgeting, onboarding: to you these are all just systems that either work or don't, and you're the person who makes them work. No task is too small for you, and no task stays manual for long. If something's repeatable, you make it repeatable by a system, not by you doing it again next month.Your job is to spin the web: build the system, get it working cleanly, hand it off or automate it, then move to the next thread that needs attention. You're not looking to permanently own one function. You're looking to be the person who makes everything work, everywhere, and then moves on to what's next. That requires real resourcefulness: you don't wait to be told how, you figure it out.You can hold a lot of context across the entire company in your head at once (priorities, people, half-finished projects, upcoming deadlines) without losing the thread or spiraling off chasing the wrong thing. You know the difference between "interesting" and "important right now," and you protect your attention, and the COO's, accordingly.

Core Responsibilities

• Act as the COO's right hand and a highly flexible execution partner. Take on whatever the company's highest-priority gap is at any given moment, from strategic projects to hands-on process work.
• Run the COO's operating rhythm, including priorities, time, meeting prep, and follow-through. Build it as a system that keeps the highest-leverage work moving rather than managing it by hand.
• Own Photon's events, from team offsites and celebrations to marketing and industry events. You know how to pull together a great hang, and you build the playbook so the next one is even easier.
• Own the systems behind how Photon finds, hires, onboards, and supports its people, treating this as an operations and tooling problem, not an HR administration one.
• Build and improve operational systems across functions. Get each one running cleanly and efficiently, then move on to the next area that needs it.
• Hold context across the full company, including priorities, projects in flight, and cross-team dependencies, so you can flag risks and connect dots before they become problems.
• Drive execution on the COO's top initiatives, closing operational gaps that don't have a natural owner.

Required Qualifications

• 4–6+ years in a high-ownership, high-breadth role supporting senior leadership (executive assistant, chief of staff, business operations, startup operations generalist), with a track record of context-switching across genuinely different problem types
• Experience partnering directly with a C-level executive and managing their priorities and time
• Demonstrated ability to build structure and process from ambiguity, across more than one functional area
• Experience at an early-stage (Series A/B) startup, where process didn't exist yet and you had to build it
• Real, hands-on tooling and automation fluency: comfortable using scripting, no-code, or AI-assisted platforms to eliminate manual work rather than absorb it
• Strong written and verbal communication, comfortable synthesizing information for an executive audience
• Excited to work in-office in Brooklyn

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building internal tools yourself using scripting, automation, or AI-assisted platforms
• Background in healthcare or health-tech
• Comfort with data, such as light analysis, spreadsheets, or dashboards to inform decisions

Why Join Us

• Get the broadest possible view of how a Series A company scales — closer to the center of the business than almost any other role
• Take on genuinely different problems month to month, with the latitude to define how and where you add the most value
• Build the systems — including the AI-assisted ones — that let Photon feel as good to work at at 80 people as it does at 25
• Join a team that gives a shit — about the work, about each other, and about doing things the right way

Our Values

– We're ambitious subway dwellers. It's our slice and we're not letting go.

– We don't prepare fish until we've mastered rice. Quality is in the details.

– We know success happens well after lift-off. The rocket isn't our mission.

– We're digging in unexpected places. Our adventure has meaning.

– We're thriving amidst forest decay. Our day in the sun will come.

Pay Transparency

Actual compensation will depend on skills, qualifications, and experience, and includes equity and benefits. At our stage, we place significant value on equity as part of total compensation.