Director of SEO & AEO

Type: Full-time player-coach: you lead the SEO/AEO team and stay hands-on
Location: Full-time, remote, with at least 4 hours of US time-zone overlap. Los Angeles-based candidates are a strong plus.
Comp: $150,000–$185,000 USD base salary / year, depending on experience; senior candidates may exceed the band.

One-liner

Be the player-coach for Single Grain's SEO/AEO team: do the work, coach the team, improve the results we deliver for clients, and turn proven AI workflows into the way the whole team works.

About the role

We're looking for a Director of SEO & AEO to lead Single Grain's SEO/AEO team and improve the results we deliver for clients. This is a player-coach seat: at Single Grain, all leaders are player-coaches. You lead and develop the team and you stay hands-on: you build and run workflows, work accounts and work directly with clients. You'll own the practice's strategy, people development and delivery standards, with accountability for client outcomes and a service the team can deliver consistently.

You should be able to coach strong practitioners, make difficult prioritization calls and work directly with clients when the stakes are high. You also need practical AI expertise: enough depth to build, test and improve workflows yourself, then help the team use them well. We want people who are constantly learning in public on X.

Search is splitting between Google and answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews), and buyers build their shortlist before they click. You will work with Single Brain (our agent operating layer) and ClickFlow (our AI content-optimization platform).

What you will own

• Be a player-coach: do hands-on work alongside the team. Build and run AI workflows, work client accounts and work directly with clients, so your coaching and standards come from current practice.

• Lead and develop the SEO/AEO team through clear expectations, regular coaching and performance feedback. Identify capability gaps and recommend hiring or development priorities within an approved resource plan.

• Set the practice roadmap and help account leads turn client goals into focused plans. Allocate capacity, resolve delivery risks and make tradeoffs across accounts.

• Be accountable for service quality and client confidence. Support important strategy conversations and escalations, and partner with client services on retention and appropriate expansion opportunities.

• Establish a consistent measurement approach that connects search and answer-engine visibility to qualified demand and business results, with clear attribution limits.

• Improve how the team works. Turn proven AI workflows into shared operating standards, with human review, clear ownership and checks for accuracy and client suitability.

• Make answer-engine visibility measurable for the team: an AI citation tracker (a fixed prompt set per client, run weekly across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, logging where the client and its competitors are cited) that teammates use on the accounts they own.

• Work with adjacent delivery teams and leadership to keep commitments realistic, improve delivery efficiency and identify where the service needs to change.

What success looks like

• By day 30: Assess the team, client portfolio and delivery process, and take on hands-on client and workflow work yourself. Establish a baseline for client results, delivery quality and capacity. Agree on the highest-priority risks, success measures and ownership. The AI citation tracker is run weekly across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews and used by at least one teammate on an account they own.

• By day 60: Put coaching and portfolio reviews into a regular cadence. Introduce shared delivery and measurement standards, and run focused improvements on selected accounts with named owners and measurable tests.

• By day 90: Review the results of those improvements, document what should be adopted across the team and present a prioritized next-quarter plan covering client outcomes, team development and resources. The team knows what it owns, how quality is judged and when to escalate.

• By 6–12 months: Client outcomes improve across the team's accounts against baseline; the team runs on shared standards and AI workflows; coaching, escalation and measurement run without you as the bottleneck. Failure = activity (meetings, dashboards, content volume) going up with no readback on client results.

Evidence we want to see

• Evidence that you have led SEO or organic-growth practitioners and improved team performance, while staying hands-on yourself: recent accounts you worked, workflows you built or ran and client work you did.

• Strong judgment across technical SEO, content strategy, analytics and client prioritization.

• Practical AEO experience, with examples of what you tested, what changed and how you measured it.

• AI workflows you have personally built or materially improved, including the quality checks and failure cases. Show us one agent or workflow you built and still run: inputs, outputs, QA and the result.

• AI fluency you can show: how answer engines retrieve and cite sources, and which calls you still make yourself.

• Client results you can explain with a baseline, time period and attribution method, plus examples of decisions you made when results fell short.

• You are constantly learning in public on X. We want people who spend real time there: more than 3 hours a week.

• Steady tenure.

What this role is not

Not a pure people-manager or a QC-only agency manager. Not a seat that only delegates: you do hands-on work. Separate from the Senior Manager, SEO/AEO seat; this is a new seat. Not a content-volume role. Not vendor management. Not for occasional AI users.

How the process works

Application → 7 short questions sent to you by email (including how many hours a week you spend on X) → evidence review → live working session (diagnose a site → propose the AEO plan → measurement plan → a team plan or leadership case) → paid, time-boxed practical with a live defense → references. Redacted or recreated examples are welcome for confidential work.

Benefits

Medical, dental, and vision; life insurance; 401(k) with 4% match; unlimited PTO; monthly UberEats; MacBook; home-office stipend/setup. Subject to plan terms and eligibility.

Apply

Apply with your resume or LinkedIn. We will email you 7 short questions; answer them yourself. AI-written answers are disqualified.