[Hiring] Executive Assistant @Kantiv (formerly Joist AI)

Role Description

We are rebuilding how architecture, engineering, and construction firms run their marketing and revenue operations. Our team genuinely loves this industry. AEC moves billions of dollars through workflows that still rely on spreadsheets, email threads, and tribal knowledge, and our AI-powered platform replaces that mess with software that actually understands how AEC teams pursue work, win it, and deliver it.

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.

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
• 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

External communications

• Be the front door for customers, investors, partners, and candidates reaching the CEO
• Customers come first; 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 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
• 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
• Help close a vendor contract, run point on an offsite, or unblock something for recruiting or HR

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
• You’ve planned real travel, not just booked a flight
• You write well
• You’ve held confidential information and never been the leak
• Comfortable in Google Workspace, Slack, and new tools

What makes someone great here

• You over-communicate by default
• You ask “why” before you ask “how”
• 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
• Startup experience is a plus, AEC experience is a bigger plus