---
title: 'Director Vertical Marketing - Energy & Defence at Light'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/director-vertical-marketing-energy-defence-light-london-k4wm4gpyz548'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-14'
---

# Director Vertical Marketing - Energy & Defence at Light

- **Company:** Light
- **Location:** London, United Kingdom
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-29
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-14
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/light-inc/f50781ea-7616-48f5-8981-beb57c86aec1

## Job description

Light is building the financial foundation for businesses operating across entities and currencies, with AI agents doing routine work and people shaping how the system operates. Our ambition is to become the operating layer for entire industries. We’re looking for a Director Vertical Marketing - Energy & Defence to build our position in these markets as part of a world-class vertical marketing team. You’ll combine deep customer understanding, a clear industry point of view and commercial judgement to turn an opportunity into a repeatable way to win. You’ll own market understanding, positioning and the marketing pipeline for Energy and Defence, partnering closely with the relevant Sales Managers and our shared Product Marketing, Demand Generation and Field Marketing teams.

## What you’ll do

- Understand the market and choose where to focus. Interview customers, prospects and specialist partners to uncover buying triggers, workflows and unmet needs. Build a shared segment plan with Sales, testing opportunities across energy developers, operators, services and technology businesses, and defence technology and service suppliers with project or contract complexity.
- Define the proposition. Turn customer insight into clear positioning, competitive arguments and a credible industry point of view. Work with Product Marketing to create customer stories, demonstrations and sales kits that show why Light matters to each segment.
- Own the marketing pipeline. Build the model, set campaign priorities and lead execution with Demand Generation and Field Marketing. Own weekly reporting on qualified opportunities, conversion and progress against pipeline targets, with clear actions when performance falls short.
- Make AI part of the operating rhythm. Use AI for research, campaign execution and reporting that gets to the why behind the numbers. Investigate what drives conversion and where deals stall, validate the findings with customer and Sales evidence, and turn them into decisions.
- Be a true partner to Sales. Train direct sales reps and SDRs on the nuances of Energy and Defence: their buyers, language, workflows, procurement cycles, contract structures, regulatory context and objections. Join important customer conversations and equip the team with the insight and proof needed to move deals forward.
- Build credibility in the sectors. Speak at relevant conferences, roundtables, webinars and industry discussions. Develop relationships with industry associations, analysts, specialist advisors, ecosystem partners and credible sector voices who shape how buyers think. Build trust in environments where domain expertise, procurement complexity and security or regulatory considerations matter.
- Bring the customer voice into the product. Partner with Product Marketing to define the workflows, integrations and product requirements critical to these sectors. This includes needs around project and contract economics, multi-entity reporting, cash visibility, auditability, approvals, evidence trails and integrations with operational or project systems. Work with Product and customer teams to prioritise needs based on evidence and keep market promises grounded in what Light can deliver.
- Turn early wins into a repeatable approach. Build customer relationships, lead interviews and capture outcomes that become references and case studies where appropriate. Use win/loss learning to sharpen our targeting, message, partner strategy, events and campaigns.

## What you’ll bring

- Around ten years of marketing experience, with a strong foundation in industry or product marketing and evidence of building markets and delivering commercial results.
- Experience owning a marketing pipeline from planning through execution and reporting. You can build a model, understand funnel performance and explain what needs to change.
- An established ability to speak publicly and tell a compelling industry story, whether on stage, in a customer interview or in conversation with analysts, partners and industry media.
- Experience building trusted relationships in anadjacent complex B2B sector where domain credibility, long buying cycles and multiple stakeholders matter.
- A record of partnering closely with Sales, including training direct reps and SDRs to understand a segment and sell into it with credibility.
- Experience translating customer needs into clear sector requirements with Product Marketing and Product, distinguishing a recurring market need from a one-off request.
- Strong analytical curiosity and practical experience using AI to investigate performance, test explanations and improve decisions. You verify the output and can explain the reasoning behind your recommendations.
- Strong writing and storytelling skills, the judgement to challenge assumptions, and a willingness to do the work yourself: interview customers, map the market, write the message, build the campaign and examine the results.

You’ll bring enough sector understanding to earn credibility quickly, alongside the curiosity to keep learning. We’re looking for someone who can build a market and a repeatable approach, with customer evidence behind both.

What success looks like Clear priorities for Energy and Defence, positioning that resonates with buyers, and a growing marketing pipeline. Weekly reporting explains what is happening, why it is happening and what the team will do next. Sales reps and SDRs understand the commercial, procurement and operating nuances of each segment and have the training, content, customer proof and partner routes to progress deals. Customers and specialist partners strengthen our presence in the market, while Product Marketing and Product have a clear, evidence-backed view of the requirements that matter most. You’ll assess progress through qualified pipeline, conversion, sales-cycle performance and customer outcomes, working with Sales and customer teams to understand delivery effort and time to value.

## How we work

Light’s values are speed, simplicity and transparency. We make decisions when the evidence is sufficient, keep ownership clear and share progress and problems early. We expect leaders to raise the quality of the work, help colleagues succeed and use AI to remove unnecessary effort. This is an opportunity to shape priority markets from the beginning, with direct influence on how Light understands customers, takes its product to market and develops its offering.

The good stuff 🏢 In-office culture, high talent density. 💸 Competitive salary. 🏝 25 days annual leave plus public holidays. 🚀 Define what winning looks like in a vertical from the very first deal. 🌍 Regular travel to Copenhagen, Munich, NY, Paris, and wherever Energy & Defence customers, partners and industry events take us. 🥳 Off-sites twice a year. The last one was in Italy.

How to apply Tell us about a specialist market you helped grow: how you built the pipeline, earned credibility with customers and partners, and equipped Sales to win. Share a time your analysis changed the plan, and how customer insight shaped a product requirement. Light is an equal opportunity employer.

## About Light

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Light provides an AI-native, multi-entity financial platform (ERP) that automates global accounting, AR, AP, expenses, and financial reporting for multinational technology companies.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: Copenhagen, Denmark
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Jonathan Sanders (CEO) and Filip Kozjak (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Financial Software / Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) / Fintech
- **Target customers**: B2B, specifically multinational technology companies and businesses with complex multi-entity accounting needs.
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To build the Smart Financial Platform, redefining ERP by shipping fast, joyful features built for finance and revolutionizing the world’s largest and oldest software category. [light.inc](https://light.inc/careers)

## Products & Services
- **Light Platform (AI-Native Financial Platform)**: A unified SaaS platform that combines General Ledger, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, expenses, bookkeeping, and financial reporting. It is built on a best-in-class in-memory HTAP database for instant reporting and is designed to scale to billions of transactions. Key features include immutable record keeping, AI-powered accounting (e.g., a "finance companion" for snapping receipts and answering policy questions), automated workflows, and multi-entity consolidation. [light.inc](https://light.inc/?ref_type=organic)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available.
- **Key Metric**: **Total Funding: $43 Million**. This includes a $13M Seed round (led by Atomico, June 2024) and a $30M Series A (led by Balderton Capital, October 2025). [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/uselightinc)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Atomico (Seed lead), Balderton Capital (Series A lead). The team is also crafted by engineers and designers from world-class companies like Spotify, X, AWS, Klarna, Google, and Shopify. [light.inc](https://light.inc/careers)
- **Growth Signals**: The company is in a "high-velocity go-to-market phase" with rapid customer onboarding. Headcount has grown **+175% year-over-year** (from ~22 to 61+ employees). The company is actively shipping features faster than ever and fielding many RFPs. [light.inc](https://light.inc/careers), [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/uselightinc)

## Competitive Advantages
- **AI-Native Architecture**: Unlike legacy ERP systems (e.g., NetSuite), Light is built from the ground up as an AI-first platform, enabling features like automated workflows, smart predictions, and a conversational finance assistant.
- **Performance at Scale**: Built on an in-memory HTAP (Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing) database, Light boasts sub-500ms response times for any transaction or report, even at billions of transactions, whereas competitors can take up to 100 seconds. [light.inc](https://light.inc/?ref_type=organic)
- **Immutable Ledger**: Uses an immutable ledger for perfect audit trails, a critical feature for compliance that traditional, editable databases lack. [light.inc](https://light.inc/?ref_type=organic)
- **Multi-Entity Focus**: Purpose-built to solve the extreme complexity of multinational accounting, eliminating the need for a "finance frankenstack" of multiple disconnected systems. [light.inc](https://light.inc/?ref_type=organic)

## Strategic Focus
- **Go-to-Market Velocity**: The company is aggressively scaling its sales, onboarding, and customer experience teams to capture market demand.
- **Product Velocity**: Shipping new features and improvements at a rapid pace, focusing on making the platform more intuitive and powerful.
- **Global Expansion**: With offices in London, Copenhagen, and New York, and a remote team across Europe and the Americas, Light is building a global presence to serve international customers. [light.inc](https://light.inc/careers)
- **Talent Acquisition**: Actively hiring across engineering, sales, implementation, and AI strategy to fuel its growth phase.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: The company values speed, simplicity, clarity, and joy. They emphasize a "joyful user experience" for both customers and employees.
- **Work Environment**: Offers a hybrid/office model with physical offices in London, Copenhagen, and New York. Employees typically work from physical offices. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/light-lightinc)
- **Perks & Benefits**: Includes healthcare benefits (dental, health, vision), life insurance, 401(K) (US), generous parental leave, company equity, and free snacks/drinks. They also have quarterly team events ("Starsite") in iconic European cities. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/light-lightinc), [light.inc](https://light.inc/careers)
- **Impact**: Opportunity to work on a "world-class" product redefining a massive, legacy software category (ERP) with a highly skilled team from top tech companies. The engineering culture is described as "crafting the AI-native financial platform" with a focus on speed and quality. [light.inc](https://light.inc/careers)

## Sources
1. [light.inc](https://light.inc/careers)
2. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/light-lightinc)
3. [light.inc](https://light.inc/?ref_type=organic)
4. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/uselightinc)
5. [builtinnyc.com](https://www.builtinnyc.com/company/light-lightinc)

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