Executive Assistant

About Panda Drum

US wellness e-commerce brand. 300,000+ customers, ~$50M revenue this year, 3x growth three years running. Steel tongue drums, instruments anyone can play, sold direct to consumers in the US. ~40 people remote across Europe, the US and Asia, plus 100+ content creators. Profitable, bootstrapped, founder-led. The founder is Polish and based in Warsaw, which is why this role is Poland-first but not Poland-only.

The honest version of this job

The founder makes fast decisions across supply chain, marketing, hiring and finance. Two things fall through the cracks. First, follow-through: a contractor payment that slips, a subscription that runs out of credits and blocks a designer, an onboarding email promised "today" three days in a row, a signature nobody chased. Second, decisions that never needed him: too many people have direct access to the founder, and most of what reaches him could be handled by someone who knows how he thinks.

Follow-through is the floor of this job. You own the calendar, inbox triage, payments calendar, tools and subscriptions, travel, meeting prep and follow-ups, and one open-loops list that is always current and always true. The job itself is judgment: you become the filter for the senior team, you make decisions inside a defined authority zone, you sit in on hiring, and in your first 30 days you build AI automation around the founder's inbox and calendar so the routine runs without you.

Single-principal role. You work for one person. You will see compensation, supplier terms and hiring decisions before anyone else in the company. Discretion is the core of the job, not a feature of it.

Who you'd work with

Marek, the founder. Zero to multiple eight figures in revenue in four years, no investors, profitable. You will never have to guess where you stand. Praise is rare, correction is constant, none of it is personal.

He communicates in short Slack messages, at any hour, from any time zone. Messages are flagged urgent or non-urgent. Urgent means immediate acknowledgment and action, weekends included. Non-urgent is yours to schedule inside your own system. Mid-November through mid-December is peak season: full standby, weekends contractual, everything reaching you is urgent by default. Outside that, the intensity is real but it's yours to organize. This is not a job you do from a beach, and it's not a job that expects you awake at 3 AM for nothing.

What you get back: zero politics, zero committees, a principal who backs his people publicly, pays above market and on time every time, and hands real trust fast to people who close loops. If you'd rather be corrected in one sentence than managed by hints, this is the best seat in the company.

If you come from corporate, read this twice

Corporate-only backgrounds do not make it here. Not sometimes. Not with effort. We've tested it. If your entire career is consulting, banking, a shared-service center or a big company, you have been trained that there is one right answer and a policy that contains it. Here there are fifty right answers and your job is to pick the most useful one in the next ten minutes with no policy and no one to ask.

Being tired of corporate bureaucracy is not a qualification. Wanting to escape it is not the same as being able to operate without it. The people who thrive here have already left corporate once and survived at least a year somewhere fast, messy and founder-led.

What you will actually do

• Calendar and scheduling across CET, US and China, protecting deep-work blocks, drafting reschedules that keep relationships warm

• Payments calendar: contractors and team paid on the 1st and 15th without exception, you run the checklist and confirm execution landed

• Tools, subscriptions, credits, seats, access. Nobody waits

• Inbox triage: draft replies, chase signatures and open loops, flag only what genuinely needs the founder's judgment

• Meeting prep and follow-through: agenda in, action items out, owners chased until closed

• Filter and decision proxy for the senior team inside an agreed authority zone

• Second chair in hiring interviews

• Travel: flights, hotels, visas, full itineraries for Europe, US and China

• Personal admin: the line between company and founder life is thin, expect both

• Build the automation layer: small AI tools around inbox, calendar and follow-ups, so you spend your time on the part that thinks

What we need from you

• 4+ years as an EA or right-hand role, at least 12 months of it supporting one principal directly (founder, CEO, managing partner)

• At least 12 months inside a company under 100 people or founder-led, after any corporate chapter. This is a hard requirement

• Direct communicator. Late, wrong or at risk gets said plainly and early. Hinting is not communicating

• You close loops by reflex. A task without confirmation is not done

• You verify. "Done" means you checked, not that someone told you

• Comfortable with numbers: you read an invoice, catch a discrepancy, keep a ledger clean, and notice when a total doesn't sum

• Real AI fluency: you build simple automations with tools like Claude and ChatGPT, not just prompt them to draft

• Excellent written and spoken English (C1+). Polish is a plus, not required

• Core availability CET business hours, urgent-flag responsiveness beyond them, full standby mid-November to mid-December

Toolstack

Google Workspace (Gmail, Calendar, Drive), Slack, Notion, Fireflies, Recruitee, DocuSign or similar, Wise/Payoneer style payment tools, spreadsheets. Comfort using AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude) to draft, summarize and prepare is expected, we work that way daily.

This job is not for you if

• You run a freelance business, agency, coaching practice or personal brand alongside. Full focus, no exceptions

• You need instructions to act. You'll get one sentence and full accountability

• You find checking the same list every single day beneath you.

• Your whole career is corporate. See above
  

Why Panda Drum?

You will sit next to every decision the company makes: supply chain, hiring, marketing, finance, all of it crosses your desk. No committees, no politics, no six people to align before anything moves. Decisions here take minutes, and you will watch how they get made. The company is profitable and growing fast, so the seat is stable, but nothing about the work is corporate. If you have ever wanted to see how a business actually runs, this is the closest view that exists.