AE Studio is a leading technology innovation studio specializing in software, data science, and AI development and research. We do industry-leading client work, incubate our own forward-thinking skunkworks startups, and do research in future technology, including the rapidly developing areas of Brain-Computer Interfaces and AI Alignment. All of this is in service of our ultimate mission to increase human agency. We are looking to hire a Director of Marketing who aligns with our philosophy and can take our marketing efforts to the next level.
As a Director of Marketing at AE Studio, you will:
- Be one of the founding members of the marketing team at a rapidly growing company.
- Market an organization that boasts the brightest minds and best talent in the industry, all committed to doing impactful work.
- Craft and share compelling stories to the market, such as our exceptional client work (with clients such as Samsung, Walmart, EA, Ritual, Salesforce and Scotch & Soda), our skunkworks startup exits, and contributions to research, like our win of the Neural Latents Benchmark challenge.
- Help build the growth marketing strategy from the ground up — playing a pivotal role in achieving our ambitious goal of reaching $100 million in revenue within the next three years.
Key Responsibilities
- Strategy & Planning
- Design, implement, and continuously improve AE’s marketing strategy and programs that support client acquisition, build brand and thought leadership, and fuel our company’s growth and vision.
- Operate across all channels — email, paid advertising, partnerships, SEO, social media, in-person and virtual activations, and other creative channels we haven’t developed yet.
- Effectively allocate and manage the marketing budget in collaboration with finance and sales.
- Demand Generation
- Develop a strategy to scale the inbound funnel to meet the next phase of business goals.
- Optimize lead nurturing strategy to find shorter and more impactful ways to move prospects through their own buying journey through content, email, re-targeting and more.
- Support driving efficiency, partnering closely with sales to streamline reporting, lead scoring, automations and day to day tasks like segment management and data enrichment.
- Content and Branding
- Oversee content creation and distribution, especially in the areas of software, data science, and AI.
- Create compelling ad, email, and landing page content that attracts and engages target audiences and ensures brand consistency.
- Refine brand messaging positioning over time based on market traction, customer feedback, and desired differentiation.
- Conceive and execute engagement and content campaigns to drive awareness and retention, including (when relevant) physical and virtual events.
- Data and Analytics
- Own data and analytics: set KPIs, track performance metrics, and run experiments to measure the effectiveness of marketing initiatives.
- Optimize conversion rates for all of the various funnels of the company’s business.
- Technical Expertise
- Have a technical background sufficient to deeply understand software, data science, AI, BCI, AGI, and other advanced technologies used at AE Studio.
- Be able to leverage those concepts within the marketing plan to generate outsized returns and attention, including in our client work, skunkworks, research, thought leadership, etc.
- Team Coordination and Leadership
- Work closely with leadership to manage the marketing team and coordinate with other departments like sales, project success, skunkworks and research.
Skills
- B2B marketing strategy execution
- Strong analytical skills
- Must be able to develop insights using advanced analysis techniques within Sheets, SQL, etc.
- Experience with Google Sheets, Pipedrive CRM, HubSpot, SQL, Looker Studio, Google Analytics, A/B testing tools, and other parts of the modern marketing stack
- Excellent communication, time management, adaptability, and negotiation skills
- Creativity and innovative thinking
- Good managerial skills for team coordination
- Growth mindset for yourself and others
- In-depth understanding of digital marketing, email marketing, and SEO
- Technical proficiency in advanced technologies, such as BCI, AGI, and AI Alignment
Qualifications
- A wealth of marketing and growth experience with a track record of building and scaling high-performing B2B customer acquisition machines from the ground up
- Technical background or strong familiarity with software development, data science, AI, or similar fields and an entrepreneurial mindset, and have a relentless drive for success
- Strong analytical skills and a knack for using data to make decisions
- Ability to translate high-level strategy with hands-on execution when necessary
- Experience in a player / coach position. You will be expected to execute on the strategy you create, prior to scaling and managing the team to support this.
- Experience managing a budget and making every dollar count
AE’s Core Values
AE Studio is a deeply mission and core values driven organization. We take pride in our alignment with our values. You will constantly hear “I’ve never been at a company that actually follows their core values like this. It’s amazing.” You’ll also hear that people grew more at AE than ever before in their career, both professionally and personally, through coaching, feedback, and working around other A-players.
Alignment with our core values is a critical aspect of the selection process. We will hire someone who can live these values and work in a values-aligned way:
- Growth Mindset Within Effective External Structures
- View challenges as opportunities, relying on structures that allow presence and trust
- Take Accelerating Large A/B Tested Baby Steps
- Focus on lasting progress through careful, accelerating growth
- Over Communicate Effectively Rather Than Under Communicating
- Emphasize clarity, generosity, feedback, and trust in communication
- Be a Good Tripper with an Ownership Mentality
- Emphasize ownership, initiative, and determination, working together to create value
- Balance Steelmanning with Working Plans
- Foster empathy, articulation, and improvement in decision-making while moving forward with effective planning
Benefits
- AE Studios believes in fair and equitable pay. Annual compensation for this role is $130,000 to $160,000 and is dependent on numerous factors, including but not limited to location, work experience, and skills.
- Work out of our office on Abbot Kinney in the heart of Venice, CA
- A best-in-class product and software team at your back to support you in building automations, products, insights, AI integrations, and whatever else you need to make marketing succeed
- Diversified, multi-company equity plan
- Platinum health insurance
- A fast-growing team with a happy crew of former entrepreneurs, data scientists, full stack developers, UX/UI designers and product managers
- Get to know the absolute cutting edge in technology and innovation for now and into the future. You will work on the technology, products and ideas that will shape the next 20+ years of human experience.
- Weekly lunches with the US team. Monthly happy hours with friends and families. Regular team building activities and fun times together.
- Yearly retreat bringing together the whole team (with tropical fun and hackathons)
Equity
Working at AE means receiving equity in some of our client projects and in the Skunkworks projects we incubate. The equity granted is priced at a value of $0 when you receive it. If it were otherwise, you'd be forced to pay taxes. But to be clear, there are no free lunches, only the choice of who pays for your sandwich.
At AE, the equity you receive is not free to AE. We invest millions annually in Skunkworks projects - paying our employees to build technology for which no client pays a bill. We receive equity from certain clients, which means we accept less in terms of our billable rate. We then pass that equity on to our employees. Sure it's priced at $0 on day 1 - a call option on a stock trading at $100 with a strike price of $100 is priced at $0 today for tax purposes, but you'd want to receive that option. If you received that option on a dozen stocks, you'd be fairly confident that some of them would be worth a lot more than $0.
Offering this equity (by investing in Skunkworks or offering clients a lower rate) comes out of AE's margins. Theoretically, we should be lowering salaries to compensate. But we're competitive on that front as well. Over the long-term, we believe AE employees who stick around are likely to fare extremely well monetarily (no legal promises). We think long-term. You should too when you choose your employer.
We are looking to hire people who think long term. People create exponentially more value here in their 3rd or 4th year rather than their 1st or 2nd, and that only increases. The value you create leads to more equity issued every year, and you retain it while you remain at AE or at a Skunkworks co that spins out, in order to free up equity for others, which is how we afford to be generous with the equity.
* Disclaimer: If you leave AE on good terms, you can retain 20% of your equity if you continue to send leads our way, share our core values, etc. If you leave AE for your own AE-incubated Skunkworks project (or someone else's), you retain 100% of your equity. Folks create exponentially more value here in their 3rd and 4th years than their 1st or 2nd - we want folks who think long-term like we do.