Head of Marketing

Job description

Convex is the backend platform that keeps up with you and your agents. Our mission is to fundamentally change how software is built on the Internet by empowering developers to create fast, reliable, and dynamic apps without a backend team. We provide a full-stack app platform carefully designed with database, compute and backend abstractions that allow developers and LLMs to move fast but also create products that scale and remain simple over their lifetime. The Team: https://convex.dev/about-us Convex has assembled a team that has built and designed some of the largest platforms in the world, and scaled companies to millions in revenue and thousands of employees. We’re a group of friendly, collaborative, and passionate people that love working in-person together in our office in San Francisco. We hire primarily in SF but have a few experienced folks working remotely in certain situations. The Role: Might as well say the obvious thing out loud: running marketing is hard. “Marketing” is a collection of wildly differing disciplines: brand, product marketing, demand gen, content, community, and events. Most companies ask one person to be great at all of it, end up with someone fine at everything, and spend the next year disappointed about the gaps. We'd rather be honest up front about the challenge, and find a leader who has the self-awareness to know what they’re truly excellent at with the taste to fill the gaps where they’re not. At a company our stage the founders (James and Jamie) are the de facto CMO(s). They have strong, earned perspectives. The right hire is comfortable working with that: taking founder conviction and making it sharper, while still able to defend their views. The job itself is to own how we tell the world about Convex. You'll work with the team that already exists and hire for what’s missing as the strategy demands it. We'll be straight with you: we’re going to be deliberately picky on this one. There’s more bad marketing in the world than good, and the founders can keep doing this job for a while. If that reads as a challenge, good. What You'll Do: - Own Convex marketing end to end: positioning, launches, content, community, events, and brand. - Decide what we don't do. Pick the two or three motions that matter most and go deep. - Work directly with the founders, helping them refine their points of view into excellent marketing. - Build and lead a small, excellent marketing team over time, and do the work yourself until it exists. - Set the quality bar: nothing hypey, nothing generic, nothing we'd be embarrassed to put in front of a skeptical engineer. - Ship a bunch of cool marketing nobody would believe came from a database company. What Excites Us: - A track record of marketing leadership at a technical or developer-facing company, with results you can point to and explain the mechanics of. - Genuine excellence in at least one discipline (product marketing, brand, content, or community) and the judgment to hire people better than you at the rest. - Experience working directly with founders: the confidence to push back and the security to execute someone else's conviction well when they're right. - Comfort being hands-on. You'll set the strategy and you'll write the post. - A reliable nose for the difference between substance and hype. - Interest in working in-person at Convex's office in SF. IDEAL CHARACTERISTICS This is an attempt to outline some characteristics of candidates who tend to thrive at Convex. We have a high demand for both commercial judgment and the ability to actually build, while also having the typical demands of a small startup. DO THEY GET DEVELOPERS? Developer tools are different. Your audience is technical, skeptical, and quick to spot inauthenticity. Marketing that works for a business app falls flat here. We want someone who has internalized what it feels like to be a developer evaluating a product, and who markets accordingly. CAN THEY PRIORITIZE RUTHLESSLY? Marketing has more surface area than any team our size can cover, and the leaders who fail try to cover it anyway. We want someone who can look at brand, demand gen, product marketing, community, and events, pick the few that matter for us right now, and say no to the rest without flinching. That's not just execution discipline, it's a strategic bet. Doing fewer things better is the whole game. DO THEY KNOW HOW TO WORK WITH FOUNDERS? Founders have to move fast, often hold strong opinions, and need to think ahead of the market. Working well in that environment means knowing when to push back, being direct without being difficult, and building trust through good judgment rather than process. This person will spend a lot of time with our founding team and needs to thrive in that dynamic. Although to be honest we're a pretty friendly founder team. CAN THEY MARKET WITHOUT THE BS? Our whole approach is that honesty outperforms hype with this audience. We want someone who finds buzzword marketing a little embarrassing and is genuinely better at the harder thing: making the real substance land. Show us a launch you're proud of that didn't oversell. DO THEY STILL DO THE WORK? The best marketing leaders we've met never stopped making things. They have opinions about the headline, they can write the post themselves when it matters, and they earn respect through judgment rather than a title on an org chart. If you can't get in the weeds with the work, you're going to have a hard time leading the people who live there. DO THEY BRING ENERGY TO THE ROOM? Startups are hard. Building something from nothing is hard. Driving forward progress despite uncertainty is hard. Shitting on stuff is easy and just brings everyone else down. We have a high bar for quality but also a high bar for being constructive, positive, and excited about making things better. We're meant to be having fun here.