Customer Marketing Manager

Customer Marketing Manager, Startups

Contract Duration: 09-15-2026 - 06-18-2027

Location: Hybrid at San Francisco, CA 94105 (1st preference) OR Manhattan, NY 10013 (2nd preference)

Pay rate: $160/hr on W2

Preference for candidates based in San Francisco who can work onsite in a hybrid schedule (2–3 days per week). Candidates located in New York may also be considered. Must be willing and able to travel as needed to support customer events, activations, and industry engagements. This role requires an experienced Customer Marketing professional with a strong background in startup environments and a track record of building creative, high-impact marketing programs.

Key Qualifications:

• Expert-level experience in Customer Marketing, ideally within high-growth startups or emerging technology companies.
• Non-traditional marketer who can think outside the box and develop innovative customer engagement strategies.
• Proven success creating and executing unique co-marketing partnerships, customer activations, and advocacy programs.
• Comfortable managing multiple projects simultaneously while balancing competing priorities.
• Strategic thinker who can assess opportunities, prioritize requests effectively, and confidently push back when initiatives are not aligned with business objectives.
• Strong partnership skills, with the ability to work closely with Sales to understand key customer relationships, identify strategic opportunities, and drive customer-focused marketing initiatives.
• Experience developing programs that increase customer engagement, advocacy, retention, and brand affinity.
• Self-starter who thrives in fast-paced, ambiguous environments and can execute with minimal direction.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with experience collaborating across multiple functions and levels of leadership.

Job Description:

Our client is seeking an experienced Customer Marketing Manager to support how we build and nurture relationships with our startup customers —from initial success through long-term advocacy. This isn't a traditional customer marketing role focused solely on case studies. Instead, you'll sit at the intersection of our Startup Partnerships, Sales, and Marketing teams, identifying the high-growth, AI-native companies building on AI and turning their momentum into stories the market pays attention to. You'll combine storytelling expertise with strategic program development to transform customer successes into market trust and adoption. You'll build the foundation for how organizations understand, implement, and champion beneficial AI systems, while creating communities and experiences that deepen their engagement with client. This role provides a unique opportunity to shape not just how we tell customer stories, but how we cultivate and sustain meaningful customer relationships in the rapidly evolving AI space. You'll work closely with founders and early executive teams to understand their journey, create programs that accelerate their path to advocacy, and develop initiatives that keep them engaged as long-term partners in our mission.

Responsibilities:

• Develop a deep understanding of our startup customers —their products, growth trajectory, and use cases —to inform which accounts and stories we invest in
• Balance a small set of deeply bespoke, high-touch customer partnerships against scaled 1:many programs that
• Support our customer storytelling program from story identification through creation and distribution to elevate and celebrate the broader startup portfolio
• Partner with Startup Partnerships, Sales, and segment marketing to identify the high-growth startups worth amplifying, and match each to the right co-marketing motion
• Translate a single customer story into multiple formats to maximize reach (video, editorial content, case studies, social, press, speaking opportunities)
• Develop multi-format customer campaigns that accelerate market adoption
• Maximize story impact through coordinated internal and external amplification strategies
• Define and reinforce how co-marketing is positioned with Sales and customers, setting clear expectations on what's offered at what stage and building the enablement to keep it consistent

You may be a good fit if you have:

• 6+ years of experience in customer marketing, ideally b2b SaaS
• Excellent written and verbal storytelling abilities, proven through technical customer stories that drove business results
• Experience building relationships with technical executives and business leaders
• Experience working with customers of all shapes/sizes, from large Enterprises to fast-growth startups
• Track record of creating effective content in multiple formats (text, video, speakers/content for events)
• Expertise in amplifying customer stories across internal and external channels for maximum impact, using them as key growth levers across the business
• Data-driven approach to measuring and improving program impact
• Ability to manage multiple priorities while maintaining high quality standards
• History of successful collaboration across Sales, Product, and Communications teams
• Strategic mindset balanced with strong execution capabilities

Strong candidates may have:

• Experience placing customers or founders into speaking slots, press coverage, and event programming
• Background working with enterprise technology companies and their unique needs
• Experience running prioritization or intake processes in partnership with a sales organization