We are rebuilding how architecture, engineering, and construction firms run their marketing and revenue operations. We work with the firms that design and build the physical infrastructure around us: the buildings, bridges, hospitals, transit systems, and water plants that everyone uses and almost nobody thinks about. 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. We’re early, we’re moving fast, we’re hyper customer-centric, and we’re building the system of record for AI for an industry that’s never had one.
About the role
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.
Every hour the CEO spends on the wrong thing is an hour we are not winning. 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 (this is the job)
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: we rely on everyone at the company to work smart with the best available tools
External communications
Be the front door for customers, investors, partners, and candidates reaching the CEO
Customers come first here; 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 (board, fundraising, hiring, customer issues) 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 (AIA, ENR events, AEC tech summits)
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
Early-stage means some weeks you’ll help close a vendor contract, run point on an offsite, or unblock something for recruiting or HR
The smallest part of the job by design, but real
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 and you kept up
You’ve planned real travel, not just booked a flight; you know what to do when the 6am to JFK cancels at 4am
You write well.
You’ve held confidential information and never been the leak
Comfortable in Google Workspace, Slack, and whatever new tool we throw at you next month
What makes someone great here
You over-communicate by default and never make people wonder what’s happening
You ask “why” before you ask “how”: understand the goal, then build the plan
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; this industry rewards people who actually engage with how things get built
Startup experience is a plus, AEC experience is a bigger plus, neither is required if you can show the judgment
Skills Required
- 3-5+ years supporting founders or senior executives
- Experience supporting a high-output executive in a fast-paced environment
- Experience planning and managing complex domestic and international travel
- Strong written communication skills
- Ability to handle confidential information with discretion
- Comfort using Google Workspace, Slack, and new productivity tools
- Startup or fast-moving technology company experience
- AEC industry experience or strong interest in learning the industry
What We Do
Kantiv is a pursuit intelligence platform designed for architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) firms to help them pursue and win more work. The platform connects a firm's institutional knowledge, proposals, project data, and client history into an intelligent system that optimizes the pursuit lifecycle, enabling marketing teams to spend less time searching and more time on strategy.
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