Senior Manager, SEO/AEO (AI Search)

Reports to: Eric Siu, CEO
Type: Full-time, client-facing player-coach. Not a people-manager seat.
Clients: an assigned book of Single Grain SEO/AEO accounts
Location: Full-time, remote, with at least 4 hours of US time-zone overlap
Comp: $100,000–$150,000 USD / year

One-liner

Get Single Grain clients cited in AI answers and growing qualified organic pipeline, with agents doing most of the production.

About the role

Single Grain combines marketing services, software, and AI. Search is splitting between Google and answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews), and buyers now build their shortlist before they click. This seat owns SEO and AEO for an assigned set of client accounts: what to ship, why, and how we will know it worked.

You are the client's organic strategist and you stay hands-on. You set the roadmap, you build the agents that do the production, and you report citations and pipeline, not ranking screenshots.

You should be an advanced AI user. You will work inside Single Brain (our agent operating layer) and ClickFlow (our AI content-optimization platform), and build your own workflows in tools like Claude Code. Use AI for research, briefs, refreshes, internal linking, technical checks, and reporting, and check what it produces before anything ships.

What you will own

• Diagnose each client's search demand, answer-engine visibility, technical health, content system, and conversion path; set baselines and targets.

• Own the SEO/AEO roadmap for your accounts and decide what ships next.

• Track answer-engine citations: 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.

• Build and maintain the agents that do production (research, briefs, refreshes, internal linking, technical checks, reporting) and get teammates using them.

• Keep brief-to-publish under five working days, with a human check on facts, brand, and technical accuracy.

• Lead client strategy calls with proactive recommendations; give writers, developers, and analysts clear acceptance criteria.

• Report monthly in terms a GM would use: citations, qualified organic traffic, and pipeline or revenue where attribution allows.

• Write runbooks so the system runs without you at the keyboard.

What success looks like

• By day 30: client diagnoses done; baselines set for citations and qualified organic pipeline; your AI citation tracker is live and at least one teammate runs it on an account they own.

• By day 60: an agent-built brief-to-publish pipeline is running on every account; the monthly citation + pipeline report is in use with clients.

• By day 90: brief-to-publish under five working days; at least one account up on answer-engine citations or qualified organic pipeline vs baseline; a runbook another person can follow. Failure = content volume going up with no citation or pipeline readback.

• By 6–12 months: citations and qualified organic pipeline up across your book; workflows do 70%+ of production; clients treat you as their go-to marketing strategist; you have designed yourself out of the daily queue.

Evidence we want to see

• 6+ years in SEO or organic growth, currently at Senior Manager, Associate Director, Director, or Head scope, with client-facing ownership.

• Shipped answer-engine or AI-for-SEO work we can inspect: the pages, the citations, and how you measured them.

• One agent or workflow you built and still maintain that removed real production work: inputs, outputs, QA, and the result.

• One quantified result (citations, qualified traffic, pipeline, or revenue) with the baseline, period, and how you attributed it.

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

• Strong technical SEO, analytics, and prioritization judgment.

• Steady tenure; internal promotions are a big plus (same company counts fully).

• Ideal: specialist search agency or an in-house growth team that ships; B2B.

What this role is not

Not a content-volume role. Not vendor management or QC-only. Not a strategy-only seat that hands implementation to someone else. Not a people-manager seat. Not for occasional AI users.

How the process works

Application → 7 short questions sent to you by email → evidence review → live working session (diagnose a site → propose the AEO plan → measurement plan) → paid, time-boxed practical on two sample accounts 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.