Executive Assistant, Detection Leadership Team

• Starting compensation: $90,000 to $110,000, depending on experience
• Work location: In-person in Cambridge, MA (strongly preferred)

Secure Bio is a nonprofit working to protect the world from catastrophic pandemics. As advances in biotechnology lower the barriers to engineering dangerous pathogens, our mission is to make sure humanity’s detection and response systems are ready in time. Our Detection team runs one of the world’s largest metagenomic biosurveillance networks, sequencing wastewater and nasal swab samples daily to catch emerging pathogens before they reach outbreak scale.

We’re hiring an Executive Assistant to support our five-person Detection Leadership Team. Some have heavy external calendars with government partners and funders. Others have quieter weeks that can suddenly become intense when an escalation event takes priority over everything else. Your job is to keep all of it moving, and to know, without being told every time, what matters most right now.

This is a shared EA role, and we want to be upfront about what that means. Supporting one executive is about learning one person’s style and building a process together. Supporting five is different. It means making prioritisation calls across competing demands, sometimes without being able to check in first. It means understanding that when an escalation event hits, everything else gets reprioritised, calmly and quickly.

And it means building enough context about the mission and the team’s work that your judgement about what matters improves every week.

The people you’ll be supporting are technically fluent, mission-driven, and self-sufficient day to day. However, they need someone who removes friction they did not know they had, catches things before they fall through the cracks, and makes the leadership team collectively sharper by being at the centre of how it operates.

Several members of the leadership team already use AI tools heavily for administrative work, from email triage to travel planning. We would value someone who is either already comfortable with those tools or curious enough to learn, and who can help spread effective AI usage across the leadership team.

• You’ll manage the calendars of five leaders, scheduling internal and external meetings, and making the call on conflicts between competing priorities.
• You’ll plan and book domestic and international travel end to end.
• You’ll draft and triage communications on behalf of the leaders you support, sometimes to government officials and senior external partners, matching the tone and weight that each situation requires.
• You’ll manage expense reports, reimbursements, and day-to-day administrative tasks with the kind of tracking and accountability that means nothing gets lost.
• You’ll notice recurring inefficiencies in how the leadership team operates and propose fixes.
• You’ll use AI tools and productivity software to keep yourself and the team running efficiently, and over time help colleagues who are less familiar with those tools get comfortable with them.

• 2+ years of experience as an executive assistant or in a comparable administrative role.
• Demonstrated experience managing complex calendars and coordinating meetings across multiple stakeholders.
• Experience planning and booking domestic and international travel.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to match tone to audience, from a quick internal Slack message to a formal email to a government partner.
• A track record of working independently and following through without close supervision.
• Strong prioritisation judgement.
• Proficiency with common workplace tools such as Slack,…