Senior Executive Assistant - Legal & Compliance

Gusto

Gusto

Administration, Legal
San Francisco, CA, USA · New York, NY, USA
Posted on Aug 15, 2024


About Gusto

Gusto is a modern, online people platform that helps small businesses take care of their teams. On top of full-service payroll, Gusto offers health insurance, 401(k)s, expert HR, and team management tools. Today, Gusto offices in Denver, San Francisco, and New York serve more than 300,000 businesses nationwide.

Our mission is to create a world where work empowers a better life, and it starts right here at Gusto. That’s why we’re committed to building a collaborative and inclusive workplace, both physically and virtually. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.

About the Role:

The Legal & Compliance (L&C) Executive Assistant provides administrative and operations support to leaders at Gusto. They will be the primary Executive Assistant to 2-3 leaders within the L&C Team and contribute to the success of the broader organization through collaboration with key partners and other Executive Operations teammates. This person will bring structure and coordination, provide calendar and meeting management, and impact team morale through community and events.

We’re looking for someone who thrives in creating operational rigor, gets energy from supporting others, and who brings a solutions-oriented mindset to any challenge. The Legal and Compliance Team Executive Operations Partner should be resourceful, intellectually curious, organized, and a natural connector. The ideal candidate should exhibit calm under pressure, think critically, care about the details, strive to work autonomously while not being afraid to ask for help, and take pride in being part of building a high-functioning team.

About the Team:

The Executive Operations Team at Gusto is a “glue function” that keeps the operations of each team running smoothly. They partner with cross-functional teams by building relationships, communicating and cascading information, and identifying solutions to gaps and inefficiencies. The Legal & Compliance Executive Operations Partner will be tied functionally to the Legal & Compliance Team. They will have the unique ability to influence and impact all Gusties (Gusto Employees), Gustomers (Gusto Customers), and be part of scaling the entire organization in this role.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

  • Operational Excellence: Implements and maintains operational systems and processes to enhance the effectiveness of the team.
  • Calendar Support: Organizes, coordinates, and schedules meetings and events in a strategic and proactive way to reduce conflicts and increase leadership effectiveness.
  • Meeting Management: Partners with leaders to build team cadences and support day-to-day meetings through notes, presentations, tracking action items, and keeping the team on track to progress.
  • Travel Planner: Booking and arranging flights, hotels, and transportation.
  • Gifted communicator: Communicates clearly both verbally and in writing with the leads being supported, peers on the ExecOps team, and cross-functional partners.
  • Events and Community Building: Embodies Gusto Values while planning team off-sites, team-building events, and connecting the dots between different parts of the Gusto organization.
  • Special Projects and Functional Team Support: Identifies and takes on specific projects that will help improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the functional team supported. This can include annual planning meetings & project management tracking.
  • Relationship builder: You’ll be getting to know many employees across the organization, as well as many external vendors. Creating meaningful and memorable interactions should be natural to you, and something that is a source of excitement.
  • Trusted Partner: Uphold a strict level of confidentiality and discretion with all sensitive information.

Here’s what we're looking for:

Work Experience

  • 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 200+ people, and previous EA work involved working with multiple departments in a large (1,000+) 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 and scheduling from end to end, ideally with visibility to an executive team, board of directors, and external parties.
  • Experience organizing (in-person, remote, and hybrid) team events with ~30 Attendees, 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 a Legal & Compliance team is a plus.

Skills & Characteristics

  • 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.
  • 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 team and 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. (We use Asana here at Gusto)
  • Natural ability to connect the dots on different ways of working, 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: Organized, methodical, 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, helpful, self-starter, solutions-oriented.

Our cash compensation amount for this role is between $98,000 & $116,000 in Denver and between $119,000 & $140,000 in San Francisco & New York City. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate location, experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.


Gusto has physical office spaces in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City. Employees who are based in those locations will be expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2-3 days per week (or more depending on role). The same office expectations apply to all Symmetry roles, Gusto's subsidiary, whose physical office is in Scottsdale.

Note: The San Francisco office expectations encompass both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas.

When approved to work from a location other than a Gusto office, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required.


Our customers come from all walks of life and so do we. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. If you share our values and our enthusiasm for small businesses, you will find a home at Gusto.

Gusto is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Gusto considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Gusto is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If you require assistance in filling out a Gusto job application, please reach out to candidate-accommodations@gusto.com.