PR & Earned Media Lead

About Needle

Needle is on a mission to help brands with smaller teams achieve big growth with less effort. Our AI-powered marketing system replaces the bottleneck of 10+ tools, agencies, and freelancers with one platform that gets smarter every week. Brands using Needle grow 177% in a year while slashing marketing costs by 62%.

We're growing fast with 50%+ demo-to-close rates. We've raised over $2.4MM from investors like Iterative, Ethos Fund, EQ2 Ventures, and Goldbell. Now we're scaling our infrastructure to handle 10x growth.

You’ll be our first senior backend hire outside the founding team.

Why this role exists

Needle is creating and defining a new category: the AI-powered marketing orchestrator. We're replacing using 10+ tools to do the work yourself and managing marketing agencies or freelancers, not competing with them. Our product is working, we’re on track to crossing $1MM ARR soon, driving 177% growth for our customers while reducing 62% of their costs, while changing how they do their marketing (from doing + coordinating, to just feedbacking and approving) so customers who can't shut up about us. But nobody outside our customer base knows it yet.

We have the stories. We have the narrative. We have proof points that make editors lean in. What we don't have is someone whose full-time job is to get those stories placed where DTC founders, brand operators, and e-commerce leaders actually pay attention.

That's you.

What you’ll be doing

Craft pitchable stories. Take Needle's narrative, customer wins, data, and category point of view, and shape them into tailored story angles for specific publications, podcasts, newsletters, and YouTube channels. You're not building the narrative completely from scratch. You're packaging it for the right audience in the right format.

Pitch and land placements. Build relationships with editors, podcast hosts, newsletter writers, event organizers and creators in the DTC/e-commerce ecosystem. Get Needle featured, quoted, and referenced in the places our ICP already reads, watches, and listens to.

Map and own the media landscape. Know exactly which publications, podcasts, newsletters, Slack communities, YouTube channels, and creator platforms matter for DTC operators. Build and maintain a living target list. Know who covers what, what they care about, and how to get in.

Turn proof into press. Work with our team to identify customer stories, product milestones, and data points worth pitching. Shape them into angles that land: not press releases that get ignored.

Help Needle own the category. Every placement should reinforce that "marketing orchestration" is a thing, and Needle invented it. You're not just getting press: you're seeding a category in the minds of the people who matter.

Who you are

• You’ve pitched and secured earned media placements — podcasts, press features, newsletter mentions, creator collaborations. Not just written press releases.
• You come from PR, media, journalism, or comms: ideally with exposure to DTC, e-commerce, SaaS, the Shopify or startup ecosystems.
• You think in story angles, not content calendars. You can take one data point or customer quote and spin it into five different pitches for five different outlets.
• You have (or can quickly build) relationships with editors, hosts, and writers in the DTC/e-commerce media landscape.
• You’re a strong writer: not because you’ll be running a blog, but because your pitches need to be sharp, tailored, and impossible to ignore.
• You understand the difference between vanity press and strategic placement. You optimize for reaching the right 5,000 people, not any 500,000.
• You're comfortable working autonomously with a distributed, fast-moving team.

This role is NOT

• A content manager or social media role. You won't be running content calendars, writing blog posts, or managing Instagram.
• A brand strategist role. The narrative and positioning exist (although they can be tweaked). Your job is to get them in front of the right people.
• A generalist marketing hire. This is focused, specialized, earned media work.

Perks & benefits

• Competitive salary based on experience.
• Flexible, remote-first work (co-work 1 day/week if you're in a city with team members).
• High visibility and direct access to the CEO as an early team member in a fast-growing AI startup.
• Equity in Needle : real ownership, not just a mindset.
• Healthcare coverage.