Founding Marketing Lead
Confidential search · AI for the federal government · Fully remote · $120,000 to $170,000 base plus equity
About the Client
Our client builds an AI workforce for the federal government. Their AI workers are trained on government workflows, operate reliably and compliantly, and build their own tools and software to modernize processes that have not changed in decades.
America is not short on forms, policies, or good people. It is short on hours. Public servants are overworked and understaffed, and for years the large consultancies and systems integrators have promised to fix that while billing out billions. This company is doing it differently, cutting the cost of the work dramatically while helping agencies deliver on their missions many times faster.
They are venture-backed, have run live pilots, landed revenue, and are now chasing major contracts head-on against firms a thousand times their size. Their product also brings agentic coding into government, standing up working software in minutes at close to zero marginal cost.
The team is still very small. Every seat matters.
About the Role
Internally, this seat is not named "marketing." It is named after an influence operation, on purpose.
The goal is ambitious to the point of being unreasonable: change how the federal government buys and works. That takes someone who can build and wield influence campaigns, not someone who can run a content calendar.
You will own how the market sees this company. You will posture it against incumbents who have spent thirty years embedding themselves in the bureaucracy. You will build the demand engine that fuels growth, and the credibility that makes a buyer trust a team this small over a name they have known their entire career.
They want someone who will leave the traditional playbook behind and map new strategy to a domain that punishes generic ones.
Responsibilities
- Positioning and messaging: what we say, who we say it to, and how we sound
- High-quality content: long-form writing, product videos, podcasts, interviews
- Social media that earns real engagement rather than posting into the void
- Events and stakeholder mapping against decision makers at the highest levels of government
- The demand engine: targets, campaigns, channels, and the metrics that evidence growth
- Funnels, online and in person, that put the right buyers in front of the company
- Outside vendors and agencies, held to a high bar
- Speed: testing new strategies in minutes and hours, not days and weeks
Who They Are Looking For
They care less about what your resume says than about how you think. They hired their sales lead out of a human intelligence background with zero federal sales experience, because interrogation and the soft skills of a HUMINT specialist cannot be taught and government contracting acronyms can. This seat is being filled the same way.
There is no minimum years-of-experience requirement. That is deliberate.
The strongest candidates will have some combination of:
- A psychological operations, information operations, or influence-campaign background in the military or intelligence community, followed by time in marketing or brand at a startup
- Political-campaign digital experience where you owned the narrative and grew an audience from a small base
- Founding or early-stage marketing experience at a defense-tech, GovTech, or mission-driven startup where you went from zero to a real audience
- A portfolio of content you made yourself: writing, video, podcasts, or campaigns you can point to by name
Signals That Matter
- Taste. You can tell iconic content from slop, and you can produce the former.
- Zero to one. You built the audience, you did not inherit it. "I grew it from 0 to 5,000" is more interesting here than "I grew it from 5 million to 6 million."
- AI-native. You already use AI daily and have automated parts of your own job. The bar runs in both directions: they want the work done with AI, and they can spot AI slop instantly.
- Three audiences at once. Political appointees, career civil servants, and AI and tech enthusiasts. You can move between all three without sounding like a vendor to any of them.
- Comfort in ambiguity. You make the call with incomplete information and correct fast when the market tells you you are wrong.
- Tempo. If your answer to "what is your plan" starts at 30, 60, and 90 days, this is not the right seat. Think day one, day three, day seven.
Requirements
Must-Haves
- US citizen, eligible to obtain and maintain a US security clearance. No sponsorship available.
- Experience in one or more of: growth, events, marketing, psychological or information operations, or political campaigns
- A track record you can point to with names and numbers: campaigns you ran, pipeline you drove, content that landed
- A portfolio, website, or body of published work. Applications without one will not be reviewed.
- Comfort owning strategy and hands-on execution as the only marketer in the building
Nice-to-Haves
- Based in the DMV or NYC
- Experience marketing technical or software products
- Experience marketing to or selling into government
- A real point of view on why campaigns like Anduril's "Don't Work at Anduril" and its Barracuda videos worked
The Environment
The company is fully AI-native. You will have room to automate the marketing function itself: agents that draft, research, run campaigns, and report on what is working, so your time goes to judgment instead of production. Bring an idea for what should run itself and you will get the agents and the budget to build it.
The category is being defined in real time. The product ships fast. The message that worked last week will not be right this week. You will work in that ambiguity.
Compensation & Benefits
- Base: $120,000 to $170,000 plus equity
- Fully remote, with travel for events
- Employer-paid health, dental, vision, and life insurance, plus 401(k) matching
- Unlimited PTO with 10 standard holidays and an end-of-year break, plus a policy requiring a minimum of two weeks off every year
- Work-from-home budget, monthly coworking stipend, phone or internet reimbursement, annual learning budget, team offsites
- Max-tier AI subscriptions and very large token budgets
How to Apply
This is a confidential search run by Sitreps Talent, the leading community of veterans in business. The client is disclosed to candidates who advance past an initial conversation.
Apply through this posting and include a link to your portfolio or published work. Applications without a portfolio link will not be reviewed.