Head of Marketing

Matter Intelligence • San Francisco, CA

3d • Onsite

About The Position

Matter Intelligence is building a first-of-its-kind physical intelligence company at the intersection of advanced sensor hardware, AI, and compute. Our team of former NASA, JPL, Palantir, and Google leaders are developing next-generation airborne and spaceborne sensing systems and the intelligence products that turn those observations into detailed understanding of the physical world. We are looking for the person who will make the world understand why that matters. This is not a traditional corporate marketing job. We are looking for someone who can build a brand people want to be associated with. Someone who can make an obscure technical breakthrough feel inevitable, make the right engineer want to quit their job and join Matter, make an investor feel like they are discovering the next great company before everyone else does, and make the technology community pay attention every time Matter has something to say. You will own Matter's brand, communications, content, social media, PR, executive presence, events, website, and broader cultural footprint. You will work directly with the CEO and leadership team to decide what stories Matter tells, how we tell them, where we tell them, and who needs to hear them. Most importantly, you need taste. You should have strong instincts about what is interesting, what looks good, what sounds intelligent, what feels forced, and what will actually resonate with the kinds of people Matter wants to attract and the cultural moment we’re in. You will be expected to move quickly, create from nothing, and produce results without waiting for someone to hand you a playbook.

Requirements

• Unusually online, following great technology companies before everyone else starts talking about them.
• Knowledge of which founders are interesting, which writers are worth reading, which podcasts matter, which conferences are actually good, and which parties everyone somehow ends up at.
• Understanding of the culture of venture-backed deep tech.
• Extremely strong taste and equally strong opinions about what makes great technology marketing.
• Exceptional writing ability.
• Ability to understand highly technical subjects without flattening them into meaningless marketing language.
• Ability to make complicated things feel understandable without making them feel simple.
• Comfort moving between an engineering lab, a journalist's inbox, a founder dinner, a conference backstage, and a social media feed.
• Highly creative but intensely results-oriented.
• Huge motor: moves quickly, follows through relentlessly, and creates opportunities rather than waiting for them.
• Humility to do whatever needs to get done, from developing narrative for satellite announcements to editing CEO posts, coordinating photographers, pitching journalists, and helping set up events.
• Demonstrated track record of growing audiences.
• Instinct for finding and telling great stories.
• Deep familiarity with the venture-backed technology ecosystem.
• Relationships across media, technology, founders, investors, creators, or events.
• Ability to generate earned attention rather than simply buy it.
• Comfort working directly with founders and senior executives.
• Ability to understand technical products and communicate them credibly.
• High agency and an ability to operate with very little structure.
• Speed, creativity, judgment, and relentless follow-through.
• Experience in deep tech, space, AI, hardware, defense technology, robotics, science, or similarly technical industries is highly valuable.
• Ability to see an incredible engineering test and immediately know there are five different stories hiding inside it.
• Experience rewriting a company's announcement because it was technically impressive but painfully boring.
• Ability to explain precisely why certain technology companies have great brands.
• Belief that most corporate social media is terrible.
• Understanding that building a founder's public profile involves much more than scheduling posts.
• Understanding that sometimes the most important marketing opportunity happens at a 20-person dinner rather than a 20,000-person conference.
• Ability to call a journalist, text a founder, brief a designer, interview an engineer, edit an essay, and review a website without changing personalities.
• Ability to operate without being told exactly what to do next.
• Instinct to ask: "How do we make the right people care about this?" when something important is happening.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in deep tech, space, AI, hardware, defense technology, robotics, science, or similarly technical industries.

Responsibilities

• Build the Matter Brand: Own and continually sharpen Matter's identity, voice, visual language, and position in the market. Make Matter feel like one of the most ambitious, technically credible, and culturally interesting companies being built. Guide the creative direction behind everything we put into the world—from our website and launch materials to recruiting collateral, photography, videos, presentations, merchandise, events, and physical spaces. Maintain an exceptionally high bar for quality. Matter should never look or sound like a generic aerospace company, defense contractor, AI startup, or corporate marketing department. Build a team of designers, photographers, filmmakers, web developers, agencies, and other creative vendors when necessary—but be capable of doing a surprising amount yourself.
• Make Matter Impossible to Ignore: Own Matter's presence across X, LinkedIn, and emerging platforms. Develop a social strategy that materially grows Matter's audience and creates sustained interest around what we are building. Turn engineering milestones, flight tests, satellite development, technical discoveries, company culture, customer work, and the people behind Matter into compelling stories. Create moments people want to talk about, share, and be part of. Build anticipation around launches and milestones rather than simply announcing them after they happen. Know when Matter should participate in a conversation, when we should create the conversation, and when we should stay quiet. The goal isn't "engagement." The goal is to create genuine gravity around Matter and grow mindshare with key audiences.
• Build the CEO Into a Recognized Technology Voice: Own and dramatically expand the CEO's external presence. Develop his voice and content across X and LinkedIn and help establish him as a respected, interesting, and recognizable voice across deep tech, AI, hardware, and venture-backed technology. Ghostwrite posts, essays, threads, commentary, talks, and other content while preserving an authentic voice. Create opportunities for him to appear on the right podcasts, stages, panels, dinners, salons, conferences, and private gatherings. Know which rooms matter—and find a way to get Matter into them. Build relationships with podcast hosts, conference organizers, founders, investors, journalists, researchers, creators, and other influential members of the technology ecosystem. You should think beyond traditional PR. Your job is to help create an aura around the founder and company that compounds over time.
• Own Press and Narrative: Build relationships with journalists, editors, publications, newsletters, and other media covering technology, AI, aerospace, defense, science, and startups. Generate meaningful earned media for Matter. Develop stories journalists actually want to write rather than simply sending press releases. Understand how news cycles work and recognize opportunities to put Matter into relevant conversations. Create launch strategies around major technical and company milestones. Know when to pitch an exclusive, when to build momentum through social, when to embargo a story, when to provide background, and when to let the technology speak for itself. Develop Matter's broader narrative and ensure that our message remains consistent as the company expands across markets and products.
• Turn Deep Technology Into Great Stories: You need to be an exceptional writer. Matter is building complicated things. You should be capable of sitting with an optical engineer, AI researcher, satellite engineer, or customer, understanding what is genuinely interesting about their work, and translating it into something intelligent people actually want to read. Own Matter's long-form editorial platform and blog. Develop technical explainers, essays, company announcements, opinion pieces, founder communications, product stories, interviews, launch content, and behind-the-scenes engineering stories. Ghostwrite for executives, engineers, researchers, and other members of the team. Use LLMs aggressively where they make you faster—but have enough writing ability and judgment that the final product never sounds like it came from one. You should care obsessively about language.
• Build Matter's Place in the Deep-Tech Ecosystem: Matter should be present wherever the future of technology is being built. You will own our strategy for conferences, speaking engagements, industry gatherings, private events, dinners, launch events, and other opportunities to bring people into the Matter ecosystem. Determine which conferences are actually worth attending. Get Matter executives and technical leaders onto the right stages. Develop creative activations around major events instead of defaulting to a booth and a banner. Help Matter host its own dinners, technical salons, launch events, recruiting events, and gatherings. Build relationships across the deep-tech, AI, space, defense-tech, and venture communities. We want someone who already participates in these worlds—not someone learning about them for the first time.
• Make Great People Want to Join Matter: Marketing at Matter is also recruiting. Partner with leadership and recruiting to make Matter one of the companies that exceptional engineers and researchers hear about and want to work for. Show people what it feels like to build here. Work with the team to understand what’s special about what they’re making, the stories that can be told, and help the world understand what makes us special. Tell the stories of our engineers, missions, technology, facilities, aircraft, satellites, experiments, failures, breakthroughs, and ambitions. Develop recruiting campaigns and content that reach technical communities traditional recruiters cannot. Create the kind of company presence that causes exceptional people to send us an email simply because they want to be involved.
• Make Investors Want In: Help Matter become one of the companies that the venture ecosystem talks about before a fundraising process ever begins. Tell our technical and company story in a way that communicates both the magnitude of what we are building and the credibility of the people building it. Understand how the venture-backed technology ecosystem works, how information travels through it, which communities shape perception, and how great companies build momentum. Create FOMO without manufacturing hype.
• Ultimately, make Matter a company that the world's best engineers want to join, the world's best investors want to back, customers want to work with, journalists want to write about, and the technology ecosystem feels it cannot afford to ignore.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation based on experience
• Early-stage equity package
• 100% employer-paid health, dental, and vision coverage
• Opportunity to work on novel sensing, data, and AI systems with real-world deployment paths to the largest industries in the world

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed