AI Content Strategist & Editorial Lead

Product.ai; Los Angeles (CA); Hybrid; USD 250,000 - 350,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Family medical, dental, and vision

Profit sharing and PIU ownership

Job summary

Product.ai, based in Santa Monica, seeks a high-velocity writer and editorial strategist to lead weekly editorial output and consumer storytelling. You will transform verification findings and founder theses into long-form essays, LinkedIn pieces, and social narratives that resonate with both readers and AI answer engines.

You will own editorial workflows inside Cortex, coordinating with AI research staff to verify claims and maintain human voice.

Qualifications

• Strong editorial judgment and ability to rewrite for clear argument.
• Experience turning research into consumer stories and thought leadership.
• Comfort with AI-assisted research and verification workflows.

Responsibilities

• Own the weekly editorial and thought-leadership cadence.
• Tell consumer Truth Pack stories and product storytelling from verification findings.
• Operate AI-native editorial workflows with a human voice bar in Cortex.
• Track distribution, engagement, and citation impact to inform calendar.
• Co-sign charter with Head of Applied AI Research & Technical Narrative within first quarter.

Skills

Editorial writing

Storytelling

Research

AI-native workflows

Tools

Cortex

AI research tools

Job description

Most shopping content on the open web is affiliate noise, and most AI assistants summarize that noise with confidence. We are building the opposite: a verification engine that grades every claim about a product across five verification states with citations intact, plus years of first‑party checkout and product‑testing data.

Role Overview

Compensation $250k - $350k

Turn verified product truth and founder thesis into essays, consumer Truth Pack stories, and social narratives that travel across readers and AI answer engines.

Product.ai is the verified truth layer for shopping: when a person or an AI agent needs to know what is actually true about a purchase, we answer with proof, including when not to buy. SimplyCodes is our first proof at scale, the code verification service whose robots run real checkouts and test discount codes so shoppers only see codes that work. It earns about $22 million a year. Profitable. Bootstrapped. Founder‑owned since 2009. No outside investors. No board. Fewer than twenty operators, outbuilding companies 10× our size.

Why This Role Exists

Most shopping content on the open web is affiliate noise, and most AI assistants summarize that noise with confidence. We are building the opposite: a verification engine that grades every claim about a product across five verification states with citations intact, plus years of first‑party checkout and product‑testing data.

We have a sibling seat (`AI Content Strategist, Research`) that pulls raw studies from our data warehouse. This seat owns the editorial and narrative engine: turning our product truth, verification findings, and founder thesis into sharp thought leadership, consumer‑facing Truth Pack stories, launch essays, and social distribution that compound audience and trust across both Product.ai and SimplyCodes.

Because our existing content and research leads are expanding into Product Manager ownership across our consumer and search surfaces, we need a high‑velocity, AI‑native writer and editorial strategist who can step in immediately, run the weekly publishing cadence end to end, and make every piece sound unmistakably human. We're also open to proposals from experienced, solo contractors who could take on some of this work as a fractional writer/content strategist.

The System You’ll Need to Model

• Two voices that reinforce each other. Founder thought leadership (long‑form essays, LinkedIn posts, and sharp industry arguments on AI‑native commerce and verification) and the institutional voice of Product.ai and SimplyCodes (consumer Truth Pack stories, product launches, and recruiting narratives). Both depend on clarity, rhythm, and zero corporate fluff.
• Verification as the editorial spine. Every story we publish stands on claims we actually tested: working coupon rates across hundreds of thousands of merchants, or five‑state verification verdicts from our `/shop` Verification Checker. Here an editor does not dress up a marketing claim; you lead with the evidence, including what failed the test.
• Distribution across humans and AI answer engines. A strong piece here has to win two rooms at once: it has to stop a smart human reader scrolling LinkedIn, X, or Substack, and it has to be structured clearly enough that AI answer engines retrieve and cite it as ground truth.
• AI agents as your editorial research and production staff. We use multi‑model workflows for corpus mining, adversarial claim checking, spine construction, and format adaptation, while keeping the final prose strictly human. Generation is cheap; taste, voice, and verification are the job.
• Cortex, the shared AI brain the company runs on. You work inside it daily alongside fewer than twenty operators, where every decision, product spec, and research study lives in a governed substrate of thousands of documents.

If reading that energizes you, keep going. If it feels overwhelming or underspecified, this isn’t the right fit.

What You Will Own

• The weekly editorial and thought‑leadership cadence. Taking founder theses, internal product breakthroughs, and live commerce debates from rough signal to published long‑form essays, LinkedIn pieces, carousels, and social threads on a reliable weekly rhythm.
• Consumer Truth Pack and product storytelling. Turning verdicts from our Verification Checker and findings from our research desk into clear, high‑trust consumer stories and launch narratives that show shoppers why verified answers beat generic AI summaries.
• AI‑native editorial workflows with a human voice bar. Running and sharpening our internal article and content skills inside Cortex: using agents for deep research, source verification, and multi‑channel packaging while holding a strict line against AI‑sounding prose.
• Distribution and citation feedback loops. Tracking which essays, formats, and hooks drive real inbound across readers, talent, press, and AI answer engines, and feeding those findings straight back into the editorial calendar.
• Your seat charter. Working directly with our Head of Applied AI Research & Technical Narrative, our Content & Research Leads, and the founder, you co‑sign a charter within your first quarter anchored to published output that clears our voice and verification bar and moves measurable audience and citation reach.

Who You Are

How you think. You write to think. You can hear the difference between a sentence that says something true and a sentence that sounds like an AI or a press release, and you will rewrite a paragraph five times until the argument is clean. You care as much about whether a claim is true as whether the hook lands.

How you work. You move comfortably between a 30‑minute conversation with the founder or a product lead and a finished, publish‑ready draft the same day. You use AI tools aggressively for research, outlining, claim verification, and derivative packaging, and you edit with your own pen so the published piece carries real voice and conviction.

What you’ve probably built. A body of published work with a pulse: founder essays, a newsletter or publication that grew a loyal readership, product storytelling at a high‑craft technology or consumer company, or tech/business journalism where you turned complex systems into plain English. We care about the writing samples and the thinking behind them far more than the logo on your resume.

Who this isn’t for. Wrong if your pitch is “let the LLM write it and hit publish.” Wrong if you want to manage an agency or a content calendar from a distance instead of writing and editing every week. Wrong if you need two weeks and three committee reviews to ship a 1,000‑word essay. You will be happiest here if you want to write the pieces that define how shoppers and builders think about verified commerce.

How We Hire

We don’t run traditional marketing interviews. Every step is built around real editorial work:

• Async video screen (plus writing samples). About 15 minutes on your own time, alongside two or three pieces of published writing you are proudest of. We want to see how you think and hear your editorial judgment.
• Calls with company stakeholders. Short conversations with the operators you will publish beside.
• Conversation with the founder. How you think about voice, narrative, verification, and what makes an argument travel.
• Paid work trial (or Fast‑Track Portfolio Review). A paid real‑work trial in our environment: taking a live Product.ai thesis or verification dataset from brief to a publish‑ready essay and social distribution package. Depending on when it hits, the trial could be a Truth Pack consumer story, a founder essay, or a byline article for a major outlet like Fast Company.

Compensation & Ownership

Total first‑year comp: $250,000 to $350,000 (base salary + target first‑year ownership and profit‑share). Base: $160,000 to $210,000.

• Target first‑year ownership & profit‑share: $90,000 to $140,000.

Product.ai is a profitable, founder‑owned company generating ~$22M/yr in revenue with zero venture debt. Beyond base salary, operators participate in our Profit Interest Unit (PIU) ownership and profit‑share program ($0 strike price units sharing in annual free‑cash‑flow distributions and tender liquidity, earned on performance milestones after joining, never day‑one vesting). 100% company‑paid family medical, dental, and vision premiums and an uncapped AI tooling budget steered by return.

Based in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, on our high‑trust hybrid rhythm: four focused in‑office half‑days (Mon/Tue/Thu/Fri 9am to 2pm), with Wednesdays and afternoons open to work from wherever you do your best work.

Selection Protocol

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