Founding Head of Marketing

Accountabilities:: Own and build the marketing function, translating company strategy and commercial priorities into a focused roadmap that supports sustainable growth. Partner with executive leadership and teams across Commercial, Product, Customer Success, and Engineering to ensure marketing strengthens customer relationships, advances strategic opportunities, and reinforces market differentiation. Define the marketing strategy, roadmap, goals, KPIs, and measurement systems, connecting marketing activity to account engagement, pipeline progression, customer expansion, and market position. Establish the marketing operating model, manage the budget, allocate resources, and determine the right balance of internal capabilities, agencies, contractors, and specialist partners. Build AI-enabled workflows and reusable systems that improve research, content quality, account intelligence, personalization, analysis, and team productivity. Lead product marketing and positioning, including messaging architecture, value propositions, category narrative, competitive differentiation, and buyer-specific communications. Translate complex technical capabilities into clear business outcomes for utility executives, engineers, planners, operators, procurement teams, and other stakeholders. Develop sales enablement materials, business cases, presentations, customer narratives, and tailored tools that help progress complex enterprise opportunities. Coordinate marketing execution for product launches and key market moments, ensuring each initiative has clear audiences, commercial objectives, and credible supporting evidence. Build an account-based growth strategy spanning acquisition, customer expansion, and advocacy, aligning Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success around priority accounts. Collaborate with Commercial leadership to define ideal customer profiles, priority segments, account tiers, buying groups, and targeted engagement strategies. Create tailored programs for strategic utility accounts and repeatable account-based campaigns for other high-fit prospects, using relevant content, executive engagement, events, partners, and coordinated sales activity. Partner with Customer Success to identify emerging stakeholders and use cases, deepen customer relationships, and translate adoption outcomes into expansion opportunities. Establish a content and market-credibility strategy that addresses the challenges, priorities, and questions most relevant to utility buyers. Turn customer outcomes and deployment insights into case studies, references, executive narratives, sales evidence, educational content, and event materials. Develop a distinctive executive voice and point of view on industry challenges, ensuring content is discoverable through traditional search, AI-powered discovery, industry channels, and strategic account engagement. Build a community of utility leaders and practitioners through executive roundtables, customer forums, events, and other programs that encourage peer learning and relationship building. Develop customer advocacy and industry partnerships through webinars, podcasts, case studies, events, and relevant professional communities. Measure marketing's contribution to stakeholder engagement, executive access, opportunity progression, customer expansion, advocacy, and overall commercial growth. Build and develop a high-performing marketing team, establish strong operating discipline, and scale capabilities in line with business needs. Requirements: You bring substantial B2B marketing leadership experience, strong product marketing expertise, and a proven ability to support complex enterprise sales. You can move confidently between strategic planning and hands-on execution, translate technical concepts into compelling commercial narratives, and build trusted relationships with founders, commercial leaders, customers, and technical teams. You combine analytical rigor with strong communication skills, sound judgment, and a practical approach to using AI to improve marketing effectiveness. 10+ years of B2B marketing experience, including meaningful experience in enterprise product marketing, account-based marketing, or a closely related discipline. Experience building a marketing function, or a significant part of one, within an early-stage or rapidly growing company. Deep expertise in product marketing, including positioning, messaging, customer research, content marketing, sales enablement, and product launches. Demonstrated experience supporting large, complex enterprise deals involving multiple stakeholders and extended sales and procurement cycles. Experience developing account-based marketing programs in partnership with Sales and Customer Success across acquisition, expansion, and customer advocacy. A proven ability to transform customer outcomes into credible proof points, references, case studies, and commercially effective marketing assets. Experience building customer advocacy, professional communities, or ecosystem programs that generate peer engagement, referrals, word of mouth, and market validation. Excellent writing, storytelling, narrative development, and executive communication skills. Experience defining marketing strategy, managing budgets, allocating resources, and balancing immediate commercial objectives with long-term market development. Strong prioritization and execution skills, with the ability to independently take work from initial insight through delivery. A practical, AI-forward mindset, with experience using AI for research, content creation, account intelligence, personalization, analysis, or marketing operations. The judgment to identify where AI can create meaningful efficiencies and where human expertise, customer context, accuracy, and careful review are essential. Demonstrated experience building, leading, and developing effective teams while managing external agencies and specialist partners. Strong business judgment, a collaborative approach, low ego, and the ability to work directly with founders, commercial leaders, customers, and technical teams. Preferred Qualifications: Experience in energy, utilities, grid technology, climate technology, infrastructure software, or another technically complex enterprise market. Familiarity with enterprise buying groups, utility procurement processes, industry ecosystems, and the challenges of establishing credibility in highly specialized markets. Benefits: Significant ownership of marketing strategy, budget, execution, and organizational development. Direct collaboration with the founders and senior leaders to shape go-to-market strategy and business growth. The opportunity to build the marketing function from the ground up, including its team, operating model, and capabilities. The chance to help advance technology supporting grid modernization, electricity capacity planning, and the energy transition. Location flexibility: based in San Francisco, with remote work available for candidates able to work West Coast hours. Salary, healthcare, equity, paid leave, and other benefits are not specified in the provided job description.