Director of Content Systems & Research

AirOps • San Francisco, CA

13d

About The Position

AirOps helps brands get found and stay found in the AI era. As the first end-to-end content engineering platform, we give marketing teams the systems to win visibility across traditional and AI search with one durable advantage: quality. Thousands of marketers use AirOps to see how their brand shows up across the new discovery landscape, prioritize the highest-impact opportunities, and create accurate, on-brand content that earns citations from AI platforms and trust from humans. We are building the platform and profession that will equip a million marketers to lead the next chapter of marketing, where creativity and intelligent systems work together and quality becomes the strategy that lasts. AirOps is backed by Greylock, Unusual Ventures, Wing VC, Founder Collective, XFund, Village Global, Alt Capital, and more than a dozen top marketing leaders, with hubs in San Francisco, New York, and Montevideo. We’re hiring a Director of Content Systems & Research to lead one of the most strategic, high-leverage motions at AirOps: advancing the profession of Content Engineering through rigorous research, world-class education, and the productization of our core IP. In 2026, Content Engineering will become the most important role inside the modern B2B marketing org, blending organic growth strategy, frontier research, and precise workflow execution. This leader will be the single-threaded owner responsible for transforming our early foundations in those domains into a durable advantage that compounds value for customers and elevates the entire market. This is first and foremost a research-led role. You will develop and scale the research engine that uncovers how AI search works, what drives visibility across agents, and which content strategies consistently win. That research will then flow into the education programs that train the next generation of Content Engineers, and into Power Agents — the reusable workflows that encode our best practices into out-of-the-box value for teams of all sizes. You will: Shape and scale our research engine: Produce and guide rigorous, frontier insights with our existing research team, that inform the market and become the public voice of AirOps’ research. Champion the rise of the Content Engineer: Translate research into curriculum, training tracks, and platform-specific education, that lower the barrier for beginners and raise the ceiling for advanced users. Productize our core IP: Guide the strategy and development of Power Agents, the reusable workflows that encode best practices, ensuring our research shows up as actionable out-of-the-box value. You’ll unify these pillars — Research, Enablement, and Power Agents — into a single compounding system that shapes how the best teams learn, build, and win with AirOps. You will have a team and external expert partners to support execution across research, enablement, and workflow development.

Requirements

• 5–7+ years of experience in organic search, with proven impact in B2B, SaaS or Marketplace Growth environments.
• Hands on experience with AI search channels and mechanics.
• Strong research leadership experience, with a track record of designing rigorous, credible, methodology-driven insights for technical and executive audiences.
• Deep curiosity about emerging AI patterns, model behavior, and the future of search with a bias for experimentation and rapid learning.
• Experience in curriculum, education, or content framework design, ideally building structured learning paths or training programs.
• Exceptional communicator who can translate complex ideas into clear, sharp narratives for both practitioners and executives.
• Demonstrated ability to align internal teams (enablement, product, customer-facing) with external market insights and community feedback.
• Thrives in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment and can build programs from zero to one, then scale them with clarity and precision.

Responsibilities

• Strengthen and scale our best-in-class research motion that blends internal analysts, external research partners, and customer data.
• Define rigorous methodologies for causal and correlational testing across AI search, organic visibility, and content performance.
• Become the public evangelist for AirOps research — representing our insights across online channels, conferences, workshops, and customer programs.
• Translate findings directly into playbooks, platform guidance, and workflow recommendations.
• Build and scale tiered Content Engineering tracks with platform-specific training, curriculum, and resources.
• Convert research findings into curriculum, training materials, and platform-specific best practices.
• Grow and steward the community of Content Engineers, ensuring programs that drive activation, retention, and long-term mastery.
• Own the roadmap for and launch AirOps Power Agents for the most demanding and high-leverage use cases.
• Ensure Power Agents deliver out-of-the-box value across self-serve and enterprise segments, informed by research and enablement feedback.
• Establish the strategy, metrics, and operating cadence that unify Research, Enablement, and Power Agents into one compounding system.
• Collaborate with Product, Marketing, Customer Success, and Sales to embed insights data directly into workflows and playbooks.
• Lead a multidisciplinary team and coordinate external experts to accelerate execution across research, education, and workflow development.

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!

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 11-50 employees