---
title: 'Executive Assistant at Generalist'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/executive-assistant-generalist-san-mateo-d58q9t9a6jav'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-09'
---

# Executive Assistant at Generalist

- **Company:** Generalist
- **Location:** San Mateo, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-06-18
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/generalist/8b6df940-0ace-444a-9693-7db8051356b0/application

**Skills:** G-Suite, Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets

> Generalist AI is seeking an experienced Executive Assistant to support the CEO and founders in San Mateo, CA. The role focuses on maximizing productivity through complex calendar management, travel coordination, and operational support in a fast-paced startup environment.

## Job description

## ABOUT GENERALIST

At Generalist, we are on a mission to build general intelligence for the physical world and make it useful to everyone. We believe the industries and homes of the future will depend on humans and machines working together in new ways. Robots can help us build more and get more done.

We build embodied foundation models, starting with a focus on dexterity. This requires advancing the frontiers of data, models, and hardware, to enable robots to intelligently interact with the physical world.

The company embraces both large-scale AI and robotics as core to its DNA. Our team of researchers, roboticists, and company builders come from OpenAI, Boston Dynamics, Google DeepMind, and other frontier labs—with a track record of shipping AI breakthroughs. Before Generalist, we pioneered large embodied multimodal models and vision-language-action models (PaLM-E, https://research.google/blog/palm-e-an-embodied-multimodal-language-model/ RT-2 https://deepmind.google/blog/rt-2-new-model-translates-vision-and-language-into-action/, Gemini Robotics https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-robotics/), launched and scaled ChatGPT https://chatgpt.com/ and GPT-4 https://openai.com/index/gpt-4-research/ to hundreds of millions of users, engineered the foundations of autonomous driving, built next-generation robots (Atlas https://bostondynamics.com/atlas/, Spot https://bostondynamics.com/products/spot/, Stretch https://bostondynamics.com/products/stretch/) and pushed the limits of what they can do (from parkour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF4DML7FIWk to manipulation https://bostondynamics.com/blog/large-behavior-models-atlas-find-new-footing/, and testing robustness https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFuA50H9uek).

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

## The Role

We're looking for an experienced, dependable administrator who takes real pride in doing admin work exceptionally well. This role works closely with our founders, primarily supporting the CEO and co-founder, with bandwidth to help coordinate broader team meetings and travel.

The core of the role is simple to state and hard to do: maximize the team's productivity by organizing their time intelligently and anticipating what they'll need before they ask. You'll be the steward of the founders' calendars—managing complex scheduling, protecting time for the highest-impact meetings, coordinating travel and executive engagements, and making sure nothing slips through the cracks.

We move fast. Important meetings come up last minute, schedules get reshuffled, and travel often gets booked on short notice. You'll thrive here if you stay calm under pressure, manage many threads at once, and communicate clearly with everyone from founders to external VIPs. You'll quickly get up to speed on the many external players we work with—partners, investors, customers, candidates—and develop judgment about how to prioritize them across a given day or week. There are no rigid rules to follow here; priorities are ambiguous and constantly in flux, and you're comfortable with that.

This role is about leverage. You'll keep the founders on time, prepared, focused, and executing against what matters most. You'll also own a range of administrative, operational, and outbound tasks so that important details never fall through. Above all, we're looking for someone reliable, with strong judgment, who learns quickly and does what they say they'll do.

## Responsibilities

- Calendar & scheduling: Manage complex calendars and schedule meetings across multiple time zones, making smart trade-offs about what gets prioritized when plans change.
- Travel & logistics: Book and adjust travel (often last-minute), manage expenses, coordinate vendors, and keep bills paid on time.
- Hosting & guest experience: Partner with the office manager to prepare for meetings, and greet and host candidates, partners, and other VIP guests so their time with us feels seamless.
- Events & offsites: Plan and execute team events, offsites, strategy sessions, and larger organizational programs end to end.
- Communications: Maintain high responsiveness and professionalism across internal and external correspondence, with clarity and accuracy.

## Minimum Qualifications

- 3+ years of administrative or executive support experience in a fast-paced environment.
- Outstanding organizational skills and attention to detail, with the ability to juggle diverse responsibilities at once.
- Excellent written and verbal communication and strong listening skills.
- Strong problem-solving, time-management, and prioritization skills.
- Adaptable team player who works well under pressure and stays composed when priorities shift.
- Biased for figuring out how to get things done, rather than dwelling in why they’re difficult.
- High degree of discretion and integrity when handling sensitive information.
- Expert with G-Suite (Google Calendar, Gmail, Docs, Sheets).

## Preferred Qualifications

- Experience supporting founders or senior executives directly.
- Experience in a startup, AI, robotics, or hardware-focused environment.
- Comfort around technical equipment and lab environments.

## What We Offer

- High-trust, high-autonomy environment: We move quickly and expect strong judgment. You'll have real latitude to define your own priorities, systems, and approaches.
- Direct exposure: You'll work closely with the CEO and senior leaders, with insight into how decisions get made.
- Mission that matters: A chance to help build the future of robotics and AI alongside a world-class team that values rigor, ownership, and speed.
- A role with real impact: You'll be critical to keeping the whole operation running smoothly.
- Two annual trips to our Boston office.

## About Generalist

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Generalist is a frontier AI research and product company building general-purpose intelligence for the physical world through embodied foundation models for robots.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: San Mateo, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Pete Florence (Co-Founder & CEO), Andy Zeng (Co-Founder & Chief Scientist)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Robotics Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Embodied AI
- **Target customers**: B2B – enterprises operating factories, warehouses, laboratories, restaurants, and logistics centers; eventually homes.
- **Mission**: “Make general-purpose robots a reality. We build embodied foundation models for the physical world.”

## Products & Services
- **GEN-1**: General-purpose AI model for robotics that achieves ~99% average success rate on tasks (vs. 64% for prior state-of-the-art) and completes tasks roughly 3x faster. Trained on half a million hours of real-world data collected via low-cost wearable devices. Available to early-access partners as a model or API. [therobotreport.com](https://www.therobotreport.com/generalist-introduces-gen-1-general-purpose-model-for-physical-ai/)
- **GEN-0**: Previous generation model that demonstrated scaling laws in robotics. Used as the foundation for GEN-1.
- **Data Collection Devices**: Proprietary low-cost wearable hardware that captures human activities at scale, enabling pretraining without large teleoperation or simulation datasets.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly available
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding – $128M (Series A closed March 2025; earlier seed round led by NVentures) [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/generalistai)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: NVentures (seed lead); Board Director Ellen Chisa. Series A investor not named in public data.
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew 325% YoY to 42 employees. GEN-1 model released five months after GEN-0, with production-level reliability. Early-access partnerships underway. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/generalistai)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Model performance**: GEN-1 achieves 99% average success rate across tasks like kitting auto parts, folding T-shirts, packing phones – a step change from sub-70% success by previous models.
- **Data efficiency**: Trained primarily on human demonstration data (wearable devices) rather than expensive robot teleoperation data; can match previous models with 10x less task-specific data.
- **Algorithmic innovations**: Custom training kernels, paged attention for real-time inference, Harmonic Reasoning, and RL post-training enable improvisation and recovery from unexpected scenarios.
- **Team pedigree**: Founders and key hires from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Boston Dynamics – bringing experience from ChatGPT, GPT-4, PaLM-E, RT-2, Gemini Robotics, Atlas, Spot, and Stretch.

## Strategic Focus
- Current priorities: Scale GEN-1’s embodied foundation model to master more complex physical tasks, expand into economically valuable settings (manufacturing, logistics, healthcare), and build the data infrastructure needed for general-purpose robots. The company is “accelerating the next phase of factories, homes, and the broader physical world.”

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Tight-knit, research-forward environment with a mix of AI and hardware engineering. On-site presence in San Francisco (SFO) and Boston (BOS). [generalistai.com/careers](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/generalist)
- **Remote/Hybrid Policy**: All open positions are listed as “On-site” (no remote or hybrid options).
- **Notable Perks**: Not explicitly disclosed, but the startup’s rapid growth and $128M funding suggest competitive compensation and equity. The team consists of leading roboticists and AI researchers, offering exposure to cutting-edge work.
- **Engineering Culture**: Heavy emphasis on technical staff (Software Engineers in ML Infra, Robotics Controls, ML Optimization, Infrastructure; Research Scientists in pretraining and post-training). Roles include hands-on robot operation and systems building.

## Sources
1. [generalistai.com](https://generalistai.com/)
2. [generalistai.com/careers](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/generalist)
3. [generalistai.com/about](https://generalistai.com/about)
4. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/generalistai)
5. [therobotreport.com](https://www.therobotreport.com/generalist-introduces-gen-1-general-purpose-model-for-physical-ai/)

## Other roles at Generalist

- [Research Scientist: Post-Training](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-post-training-generalist-san-mateo-vrnttp54gr4z) — San Mateo, CA / Somerville, MA
- [Data Partnerships](https://feeny.ai/job/data-partnerships-generalist-san-mateo-tm0yccvmgxm3) — San Mateo, CA / Somerville, MA
- [Mechanical Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/mechanical-engineer-generalist-boston-74p3xtqpvs13) — Boston, MA
- [Electrical Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/electrical-engineer-generalist-san-mateo-x985d69q4w17) — San Mateo, CA / Somerville, MA
- [Research Assistant](https://feeny.ai/job/research-assistant-generalist-san-mateo-1ahfzy22gp7s) — San Mateo, CA / Somerville, MA
- [Data Collection Lab Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/data-collection-lab-manager-generalist-boston-dr2gxr4h4snk) — Boston, MA
- [Office Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/office-manager-generalist-san-mateo-nmvjjw2x5jpv) — San Mateo, CA
- [Engineering Technician](https://feeny.ai/job/engineering-technician-generalist-san-mateo-6s93yqcagymy) — San Mateo, CA
- [Robot Science Ops](https://feeny.ai/job/robot-science-ops-generalist-san-mateo-w3g9q4n8eby8) — San Mateo, CA / Somerville, MA
- [Research Scientist: Pretraining](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-pretraining-generalist-san-mateo-7n5nnpe1pwmr) — San Mateo, CA / Somerville, MA