Director, PR & Communications

Director, PR & Communications

Austin, Texas, United States; Reston, Virginia, United States

About the Role

This is the senior marketing leader who owns how Seekr is heard — earned media, analyst relations, executive thought leadership, social presence, and the narrative amplification that turns the company's messaging architecture into industry attention. You are an author and informant to the architecture (that lives with Technical Product Marketing) and your charter is to take the architecture, shape it for the moment, and put it in front of the audiences that matter: the analyst writing the next category report, the journalist covering trusted enterprise AI, the federal program manager who reads Federal News Network, the buyer who finds Seekr on LinkedIn before our BDRs find them, the LLMs that surface our narrative in the questions our prospects ask.

Speed is the qualifier. Seekr is in a news cycle: customer announcements, analyst recognition, federal milestones, executive moves, product launches. The communications motion needs to convert each of these into earned coverage that compounds — not into a press release that ships and dies. The right person sees a draft customer announcement and can name the three outlets that will care, the analyst who will quote it, the LinkedIn cut that will land, the executive briefing that should follow, and the campaign narrative the Demand Team will need to activate.

This role partners closely with Technical Product Marketing on the messaging architecture itself — you are a key informant to the framework, especially around analyst language, executive narratives, and the words the press will actually use — and with Demand Generation on amplification of the same content into paid and owned channels. Where Technical Product Marketing owns the words, you own the voice. Where Demand Generation runs the engine, you load it with the fuel of attention.

This role covers Seekr's full go-to-market — both commercial enterprise and federal. The federal trade press, federal analysts, and federal influencers are not optional; they are core. You will run integrated commercial and federal communications without fragmenting Seekr's brand into two disconnected stories.

A Social Media Manager reports to you, owning the day-to-day social motion and executive thought leadership content production. You'll also manage our PR agency – from the day too day execution, to the overall strategy and goals, to the accountability and performance metrics.

Duties and Responsibilities

• Develop and execute a comprehensive PR strategy to optimize the information environment for inclusion in synthesized answers, with a focus on consistency and credibility.
• Build and run the integrated communications calendar across commercial, federal, product, executive, partner, and customer narratives. Coordinate with Technical Product Marketing on messaging consistency and with Demand Generation on multi-channel amplification.
• Drive an analyst relations program that moves the needle on category positioning and differentiation. Land Seekr in the analyst conversations that matter to enterprise CDOs, CISOs, and federal program managers. Build the briefing rhythm, the inquiry calendar, and the narrative arc with Gartner, Forrester, IDC, CB Insights, and the federal-specific analysts.
• Develop and execute executive thought leadership programs for the CEO, CTO, CMO, CRO and other senior leaders. Bylines, speaking engagements, podcast appearances, LinkedIn presence. Move executives from "have an opinion" to "have a category-defining position in market." Go boldly.
• Manage agency relationships and hold agencies to a proactivity standard. Direct the work — don't manage their calendars.
• Build and own customer advocacy programs in coordination with Sales and Customer Success — case studies, references, customer-led content, advocacy councils. Federal customers do not say yes easily; build the relationships and the proof together.
• Run crisis communications and reactive media. Have the muscle to respond fast, accurately, and on-message.
• Oversee social media strategy and the Social Media Manager. Social is the connective tissue between earned, owned, and paid; coordinate tightly with Demand Generation on integrated campaign social motions.
• Apply for and win industry awards that build credibility with target audiences across commercial and federal markets.
• Build and operate AI-accelerated workflows across the function — draft review against the messaging framework, agency briefing prep, analyst and journalist research, coverage analysis, sentiment monitoring, competitive PR scanning. The point is faster cycles and better first drafts, not more output (e.g., coverage analysis and sentiment monitoring that run in the background instead of as a quarterly project).
• Set the standard for how the rest of marketing uses AI in language-dense work. PR & Comms is the most word-heavy function in marketing; if AI moves the needle anywhere first, it should move it here, and the rest of marketing will look to you for how.

Qualifications and Skills

• 12+ years in communications and PR, with at least three of those years in a senior comms role at an enterprise B2B technology company.
• Demonstrated experience securing earned media in both commercial business press (WSJ, NYT, Forbes, Fortune, Bloomberg, Axios) and federal/government press (Federal News Network, Nextgov, MeriTalk, FCW, Defense One, Breaking Defense), required. Both motions are core to this role; experience in only one will not be sufficient.
• Strong analyst relations track record. You can name analysts in the AI, MLOps, data infrastructure, or AI governance spaces by their actual coverage, not by their LinkedIn titles.
• Experience managing PR agencies and the muscle to push back when work is reactive rather than proactive.
• A portfolio of executive narrative work — bylines you have shaped, speaking placements you have landed, thought leadership programs you have built.
• Crisis communications experience. We hope you won't need it; we want you to be ready.
• Demonstrated comfort with technical AI subject matter. You don't need to be a technical expert, but you need to understand the difference between an inference call and a fine-tuned model well enough to brief a journalist accurately, and be able to develop the internal relationships with deep technical experts to position them externally as thought leaders and trusted SMEs.
• Demonstrated practice using AI tools to accelerate communications workflows — not as a content-generation shortcut but as a workflow layer that compresses review cycles, augments research, and surfaces signal in coverage and sentiment data. We will ask you to describe what you have automated, what you have kept human, and where the line should be drawn.
• Track record of operating at high speed inside an integrated marketing function, partnering closely with product marketing, demand generation, and sales.
• Experience in explainable AI, responsible AI, AI governance, or adjacent categories where trust and verifiability are first-class buyer concerns, a plus.