--- title: 'Founding Product Marketer at AthenaHQ' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-product-marketer-athenahq-san-francisco-jz6gp98ewmzp' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-12' --- # Founding Product Marketer at AthenaHQ - **Company:** AthenaHQ - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $130k–$220k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-05-25 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/athena-hq/86916f81-e3d3-4ed5-9c80-a0a4e4e3f9cd ## Job description Experience: 3+ years ## About the role We're looking for a Founding Product Marketer to own how AthenaHQ shows up in the market. You'll improve the messaging foundation, lead launches, and create the assets that help customers get value fast and help Sales and CS close and retain. This is a hands-on role: you'll work directly with the founders and executive team and have real influence over how we grow. This role is in-person and based in San Francisco. ## What You Will Do Own Product Marketing End-to-End - Develop and evolve positioning, messaging, and narrative - Maintain a crisp understanding of who we serve, why we win, and where we fit in the market Lead Launches and Announcements - Plan launch strategy and timelines - Write and ship launch materials: release notes, blog posts, emails, in-app messaging, social copy - Partner with Product and Engineering to translate features into customer value Drive Adoption with Customer Success - Define adoption goals and success metrics for new features - Create enablement and customer-facing materials that support rollout - Capture and distribute learnings from the field Collect Use Cases and Voice of the Customer - Run customer interviews and synthesize insights - Build a use-case library, case studies, and reference stories - Turn insights into product feedback and roadmap inputs Support Sales with Practical Enablement - Create how-to content, demo narratives, one-pagers, pitch decks, and competitive guidance - Build objection-handling and FAQ resources grounded in real customer conversations - Partner on sales motions, messaging tests, and pipeline influence Use AI to Move Faster and Create Better Work - Leverage AI tools for research synthesis, drafting, iteration, personalization, and asset production - Improve team workflows with repeatable prompts and lightweight automation ## What We Are Looking For - 5+ years in product marketing, B2B SaaS strongly preferred - Experience owning messaging and launches for products with both technical and non-technical users - Strong writing and storytelling across formats: web, email, decks, in-app - Ability to translate customer needs into crisp product value and vice versa - Comfortable working closely with Product, CS, and Sales and directly with the founders on positioning - Strong project management; able to ship independently - Data-informed: you define success metrics and learn from outcomes ## Nice to Have - First or early PMM hire experience - Building customer evidence: case studies, references, ROI stories - Familiarity with sales-led motions, in-app messaging, and lifecycle marketing across multiple personas - Competitive positioning and category creation experience What Success Looks Like in Your First 90 Days - A clear messaging framework the whole company uses - A repeatable launch process with templates and timelines - Core sales enablement assets: how-to's, objections, FAQ, landing pages and pitch narrative - A customer insights cadence with a lightweight use-case and quote repository - A strong cross-functional rhythm with Product ad Customer Success ## Compensation Base salary starting at $130k plus benefits, generous equity plan and PTO policy. How to apply Send your resume and a few examples of your work: a launch page, email, deck, blog post, enablement doc, or anything that shows how you think and write. Include a brief note on how you use AI day-to-day. ## About AthenaHQ [Athena](https://www.athenahq.ai) helps brands take control and grow on GenAI Search. Founded by a former Google Search product manager, Athena helps 300+ global customers such as SoFi, Coinbase, and Paperless Post drive traffic and activate GenAI as the fastest-growing growth channel. We pride ourselves in a curiosity-first and AI-native culture. We have a team of former founders, indie hackers, MIT PhD, and D1 athletes. ## About AthenaHQ ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: AthenaHQ provides an AI Search Optimization (AEO/GEO) platform that helps brands monitor, analyze, and optimize their visibility across major AI-powered search engines and Large Language Models (LLMs). - **Entity Type**: Private (startup, backed by Y Combinator and FCVC) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA - **Founded**: 2024 - **Founders**: Andrew Yan (CEO), Alan Yao (CTO) ## Core Business - **Primary industry/industries**: Artificial Intelligence, SEO/AIO (AI Search Optimization), Marketing Technology (MarTech) - **Target customers**: B2B, enterprise marketing teams, and brands looking to manage their presence across AI search platforms (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, Claude, Grok) - **Mission or purpose statement**: “To help businesses thrive in the world of AI Search” — building the operating system for marketing teams in the era of AI-powered discovery. ## Products & Services - **AthenaHQ Platform (AEO/GEO Manager Command Center)**: A unified SaaS platform that provides cross-platform AI visibility tracking across 8+ LLMs, automated content optimization recommendations, competitive intelligence, citation analysis, and an executive dashboard with BI tool support (Tableau, Power BI, Looker). Includes the Athena Citation Engine (ACE) for oracle discrepancy detection. - **Citation Engine (ACE)**: A feature for citation source analysis and link building, helping brands ensure their content is accurately cited by AI models. - **Athena AI Agent**: A content optimization agent that provides self-learning content improvement, on-page and off-page actions, and prompt/response analysis. - **Athena Recommendation Engine**: Delivers automated content optimization recommendations to improve AI search ranking. - **API Access**: Programmatic access to platform data and add-on credits for custom integrations. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (private startup) - **Key Metric**: Total funding not publicly disclosed; backed by Y Combinator (YC), FCVC (seed investor in Coinbase, Instacart, Webflow, Rippling), and angel investors including Eli Schwartz, as well as current and former CMOs. - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator, FCVC, Eli Schwartz (author and SEO expert), featured in Forbes, WSJ, and Business Insider. - **Growth Signals**: Trusted by hundreds of next-gen marketing teams including Paperless Post, Ollie, Checkr, and OneSignal. The company is growing fast with active hiring for multiple roles. The founding team includes former Google Search PMs, DeepMind alumni, and engineers from Cohere, ServiceNow, and Voiceflow. ## Competitive Advantages - **Founding team pedigree**: Built by leaders from Google Search, DeepMind, and ServiceNow — deep domain expertise in how AI search works from the inside. - **First-mover in AEO/GEO**: One of the earliest dedicated platforms for AI Engine Optimization, a rapidly emerging category as brands realize traditional SEO is being disrupted by LLMs. - **Multi-model coverage**: Tracks brand mentions and visibility across 8+ major LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, Grok, Perplexity, etc.) in one unified dashboard. - **End-to-end workflow**: Covers monitoring, analysis, optimization, reporting, and competitive intelligence — an integrated platform rather than point solutions. - **YC-backed pedigree**: Strong startup brand and network effects from the Y Combinator ecosystem. ## Strategic Focus - **Current priorities**: Scaling the engineering and GTM teams to capture the growing AI search optimization market; building the platform's AI agent capabilities; expanding enterprise customer base; deepening integrations with more LLMs and BI tools. - **Growth direction**: Becoming the "operating system" for marketing teams in the AI search era, moving beyond simple tracking to automated optimization and actionable intelligence. ## Why Work Here - **Culture highlights**: Described as a team of “world-class talent from YC, Google, DeepMind, and Cohere” that includes former founders, D1 athletes, and future founders who “take pride in their craft.” Emphasis on high-agency, ambitious individuals. - **Remote/hybrid/office policy**: In-person at San Francisco headquarters. The company has two total offices and expects employees to work on-site. - **Notable perks or engineering culture**: Engineering team includes staff who “mass-deployed Claude Code agents to every corner of the codebase” and runs “daily sauna standups” — reflecting a quirky, high-intensity, AI-native engineering culture. Building at the cutting edge of how AI changes marketing and search. - **For job seekers**: 5 open roles posted (Product Engineer, Growth Engineer, Senior Product Designer, Founding Growth Marketer, Founding Product Marketer) indicating a fast-growing, early-stage environment where impact is immediate and cross-functional collaboration is key. ## Sources 1. [athenahq.ai](https://athenahq.ai/) 2. [athenahq.ai/about](https://athenahq.ai/about) 3. [athenahq.ai/careers](https://athenahq.ai/careers) 4. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/athena-hq](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/athena-hq) 5. 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