Founding Marketing Lead

Roko Labs; New York (NY); On-site; USD 110,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

Roko Labs in New York City is seeking a Founding Marketing Lead to own marketing from the ground up. This is an in-office role at our NYC office; remote and hybrid arrangements are not available.

You will shape our brand, craft content and campaigns, run growth experiments, and define go-to-market strategies, collaborating with founders and leaders while maintaining substantial autonomy over how we present ourselves to customers. We value rapid learning, sharp judgment, and a bias for action.

Qualifications

• Entrepreneurial mindset with initiative and action
• Strong writing and communication skills; able to simplify complex ideas
• Deep curiosity about technology, AI, business models, customers, and markets
• AI-native: use tools like ChatGPT/Claude for research, automation, and faster work
• High-agency: independently figure things out when needed
• Balance creativity with analysis; test ideas and measure results
• Comfort with ambiguity and willingness to own outcomes rather than tasks
• Desire to own a function and drive real impact, not just perform tasks

Responsibilities

• Build the Roko Labs brand: shape positioning, messaging, website content, case studies, thought leadership, and storytelling materials
• Create growth: develop campaigns, target markets, and collaborate with leadership and sales to generate opportunities
• Tell great stories: translate complex tech into clear narratives for executives and founders
• Experiment aggressively: leverage AI/tools to streamline work, test channels, and scale what works

Skills

Entrepreneurial

Writing & communication

Curiosity

AI-native

High agency

Creative + analytical

Comfort with ambiguity

Ownership mindset

Tools

ChatGPT

Claude

Cursor

Job description

United States Roles

Founding Marketing Lead

New York City | $110,000–$130,000 + Equity

This is an in-office role based at our New York City office. Remote and hybrid arrangements are not available for this position.

About Roko Labs

Roko Labs is a product and technology company that partners with Fortune 500 companies and high-growth startups to build and scale ambitious digital products.

We work across product strategy, software engineering, design, AI, and emerging technology. Our team is global, entrepreneurial, and highly execution-oriented.

We're entering our next phase of growth and looking for someone exceptional to help shape how Roko Labs presents itself to the world.

The Role

We're looking for a Founding Marketing Lead to take ownership of marketing at Roko Labs.

This is not a traditional corporate marketing role, and we're not looking for someone to inherit a playbook. We want someone early in their career who is ambitious, intellectually curious, highly resourceful, and excited to build.

You'll work directly with company leadership and have significant autonomy over how Roko Labs approaches brand, content, growth, and go-to-market.

One week you might develop a new positioning strategy. The next, you could launch a campaign, interview a client for a case study, experiment with an AI-powered outbound workflow, redesign a pitch deck, or test an entirely new way to generate demand.

We care much more about how quickly you learn, the quality of your thinking, and your ability to make things happen than how many years you've spent in marketing.

If you want a role where you can own a function rather than own a small piece of one, this is it.

Key Responsibilities

Build the Roko Labs Brand

Shape how Roko Labs talks about what we do and why it matters. Own positioning, messaging, website content, case studies, thought leadership, and the materials that tell our story.

Create Growth

Develop and test creative ways to generate awareness, conversations, and qualified opportunities. Work closely with leadership and sales to identify target markets, develop campaigns, and turn marketing into a meaningful driver of growth.

Tell Great Stories

Turn complex technology projects into clear, compelling narratives. Create content, case studies, presentations, and campaigns that make sophisticated technical work understandable and interesting to executives, founders, and technology leaders.

Experiment Aggressively

Use AI and modern tools to rethink how marketing work gets done. Build workflows, automate repetitive work, test new channels, move quickly, measure what works, and double down when you find something promising. You will have room to experiment. We expect you to use it.

Who We're Looking For

You're probably 1–3 years out of college and looking for significantly more responsibility than a traditional early-career role provides. You should be based in or willing to relocate to the New York City area, as this role works from our office.

You may have worked at a startup, technology company, consulting firm, venture-backed company, agency, or in another fast-moving environment. You may even have started something yourself.

Required Experience & Skills

More importantly, you are:

• Entrepreneurial. You see opportunities and act on them without waiting for detailed instructions.
• A strong writer and communicator. You can take complicated ideas and make them clear, sharp, and compelling.
• Extremely curious. You want to understand technology, AI, business models, customers, and markets.
• AI-native. You actively use tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, or other AI platforms to research, create, automate, and work faster.
• High-agency. When you encounter something you don't know how to do, your instinct is to figure it out.
• Creative and analytical. You're comfortable generating unusual ideas and then testing whether they actually work.
• Comfortable with ambiguity. You don't need a mature process before you can start making progress.
• Hungry for ownership. You'd rather be responsible for an outcome than responsible for completing assigned tasks.

A specific marketing degree is not required. Neither is a decade of marketing experience.

Exceptional writing, judgment, initiative, and evidence that you've built or accomplished interesting things matter much more to us.

What Success Looks Like

Within your first year, you will have helped define how Roko Labs presents itself to the market, built a repeatable marketing engine, strengthened our sales and client-facing materials, launched new growth experiments, and developed a much deeper understanding of what drives new business for the company.

More importantly, the marketing function will increasingly feel like something you built.

Why Join Roko Labs?

Real Ownership

You won't be the junior person executing someone else's marketing strategy. You'll help create it.

Direct Access to Leadership

You'll work closely with the people making company-level decisions and have the opportunity to influence them.

Build From Zero

There is no giant marketing organization or bureaucracy to navigate. You'll have the freedom to build systems, experiment with tools, and establish how the function operates.

Work at the Center of Technology

Our work spans software, product development, AI, and emerging technology across startups and major enterprises.

Accelerated Learning

You'll get exposure to company strategy, sales, technology, client relationships, and growth—not just marketing.

High Autonomy

We care about outcomes, not looking busy. You'll have substantial freedom in how you organize and execute your work.

Compensation

Base salary: $110,000–$130,000

Equity packages are available and will vary based on experience, role scope, and overall compensation structure.

Who Should Apply

We're particularly interested in people who have done something that demonstrates unusual initiative—built a company or side project, grown an audience, launched a product, led an organization, created something people cared about, automated a difficult process, or pursued an idea simply because you thought it should exist.

We're looking for someone who wants their next few years to be defined by how much they built, learned, and owned—not by how quickly they moved through a corporate title ladder.

Build With Roko Labs

1250 Broadway, 36th Floor, New York, NY, 10001