Research & Thought Leadership Lead

ABOUT AIROPS AirOps is the full-service platform for brand growth in the age of AI search. As consumers shift from traditional search engines to platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, the entire ruleset of growth is being rewritten. Buyers now rely on agents to discover, recommend, and purchase products and services for them. If your brand isn't part of the answer, you aren't in the running. Our platform offers everything a brand needs to get found, recommended, and earn trust. We work with category leaders, including teams at Ramp, Chime, Airbnb, ServiceNow, and Rippling, to drive visibility and accelerate growth from AI search. Backed by Greylock, Unusual Ventures, Wing VC, and Founder Collective, we're headquartered in San Francisco, New York, and Montevideo. ABOUT THE ROLE: We’re looking for a marketing leader who can take AirOps’ existing research foundation and build on it, creating a brand that’s known for being one step ahead of what’s happening in the industry and that marketers across industries and disciplines turn to and trust for its data-driven story telling. There’s no shortage of data: AirOps has millions of data points and search queries we track on a daily basis. What we need is someone who can find the interesting story in that data and turn it into high-quality, frontier content and research. This role is a blend of thought leadership, research, and brand, and we’re looking for someone who has the ability to run the analysis and the taste to know what’s worth publishing. You’ll work directly with our executive team to set the direction for our thought leadership program, then partner across the org to turn research and insights into campaigns and programs that drive brand awareness, capture the attention of senior buyers, and help every marketer stay ahead of what’s coming next. This is a high visibility, high impact role with the ability to shape our brand, tell impactful stories, and see the impact of your work every day. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Set our thought leadership program and direction: Work directly with our CEO and CMO to set the tone, direction, and strategy for our research and thought leadership program - Determine the data worth digging into: You’re plugged in enough to know what is on our audience’s mind, and what hasn’t broken through yet, and can pair that with a strong point of view on the data we should be looking at to find the next story to tell. You’re not waiting for someone to tell you what stories to write, you’re deeply curious and have a backlog of data you want to dig into. - Source and run your own research: You might not be a classically trained researcher, but you know your way around Claude Code and can learn quickly to be able to field expert surveys, query first-party product and usage data directly, and build a real point of view from raw findings, without needing to hand that work to an outside research partner. - Build a program around research: Turn insights and thought leadership content into cross-channel campaigns and brand awareness. Work across product, events, design, product marketing, paid, and organic to create tentpole “moments” around our research that amplify our brand and point of view beyond our existing audience. - Connect research to strategy: Partner closely with product and sales leaders to understand our product roadmap and target buyers, then build plans to launch research that underscores the importance of each product we launch or industry we break into - Social distribution: Own our overall voice, tone, and cadence for research-focused social posts and content. We’re looking for someone who doesn’t want to just drive thought leadership, they want to help build our brand and voice. - Our quality bar: The quality of our thinking is reflective of the quality of the work we’ll provide to our customers. This role should be the arbiter of our quality bar, moving with urgency but making sure nothing you ship looks rushed. WHO YOU ARE - 7+ years of experience in thought leadership, content marketing, research, or equivalent. - Experience working with data: You’ve produced research reports, insights surveys, and data-driven storytelling before. You know how to dig into data and find the insight from it. - Experience with, and excitement to dig into, deep datasets: We’re looking for someone who’s excited to get into Claude Code, find a data set, and figure out how to get the insights they need. You’ll have resources you can tap, but the goal is to have someone who can run on their own. - Proven experience running cross-channel marketing campaigns: You can take a piece of content and turn it into a full campaign, spanning across paid, organic, and in-person channels, and enable our customer-facing teams on how to use this data in their conversations - Strong brand point of view: You’ve got opinions on what a great brand looks like, and want to help continue to shape and refine ours. - Experience with corporate and founder social: This role should help shape how we show up on social channels and how our thought leadership breaks through the noise. ABOUT YOU - You love a blank slate and are excited to come in and champion this program. The idea of taking this on immediately gets your wheels turning with ideas. - You obsess over quality and storytelling. You aren’t interested in shipping something unless you truly think it adds to the conversation. - You’ve got 20 newsletters you read a week and are always trying to keep up to date with the latest developments, market shifts, and opinions in the space. Being able to spot a shift before the rest of the industry catches on is a point of pride for you. - You’re high-agency and hands-on. The idea of doing both strategy and execution sounds fun and you love rallying a team behind an initiative. - You love working across marketing, sales, and customer teams and see yourself as someone who breaks down silos in an org to get everyone working together. OUR GUIDING PRINCIPLES 1. Extreme Ownership 2. Quality 3. Curiosity and Play 4. Make Our Customers Heroes 5. Respectful Candor BENEFITS - Equity in a fast-growing startup - Competitive benefits package tailored to your location - Flexible time off policy - Parental Leave - A fun-loving and (just a bit) nerdy team that loves to move fast!