AI Content Strategist & Editorial Lead

Description

The company builds a verification layer for shopping, where people and AI agents get evidence about whether a purchase is worth making, including advice not to buy.

Its first product is a code verification service. Robots run real checkouts and test discount codes, so shoppers see only codes that work. The service brings in about $22 million a year.

The company is profitable, bootstrapped, and founder-owned since 2009, with no outside investors and no board. Fewer than twenty operators work there.

Most shopping content online is affiliate-driven, and AI assistants repeat it confidently. The team is building a verification engine that grades each product claim across five states and keeps its citations, backed by years of first-party checkout and testing data.

A sibling role focuses on research and pulls raw studies from the data warehouse. This role owns the editorial and narrative side: turning product findings, verification results, and the founder's views into essays, consumer stories, launch pieces, and social posts for both the verification product and the code service.

The content and research leads are moving into product management, so the company needs a writer and editorial strategist who can take over quickly, run the weekly publishing schedule, and keep every piece sounding human. Experienced solo contractors may also propose to do this as a fractional writer and strategist.

Founder thinking, such as long essays, LinkedIn posts, and arguments about AI-driven commerce and verification, sits alongside the institutional voice for consumer stories, launches, and hiring. Both need clarity, rhythm, and no corporate filler.

Evidence drives every story. Claims must rest on the company's own tests, such as working coupon rates across hundreds of thousands of merchants or verdicts from the Verification Checker on the shop page. Lead with the evidence, including what failed.

Pieces must hold up for a skimming human reader on LinkedIn, X, or Substack, and be structured clearly enough that AI answer engines can retrieve and cite them.

The team uses multi-model AI workflows for research, claim checking, outlining, and reformatting, but the final prose stays human. Generating text is cheap; judgment, voice, and verification are the job.

You will work daily inside Cortex, the company's shared AI system, with its governed set of thousands of documents covering decisions, product specs, and studies. The team is fewer than twenty operators, so the work is hands-on.

Responsibilities

• Take founder theses, product breakthroughs, and live commerce debates from rough notes to published long-form essays, LinkedIn pieces, carousels, and threads on a steady weekly schedule.
• Turn Verification Checker verdicts and research findings into clear, trustworthy consumer stories and launch narratives that show why verified answers beat generic AI summaries.
• Run and improve the internal article and content workflows in Cortex, using agents for research, source checking, and packaging across channels, while keeping AI-sounding prose out.
• Track which essays, formats, and hooks bring in readers, hires, press, and AI answer engine citations, and feed those results back into the editorial calendar.
• Within your first quarter, co-sign a charter with the Head of Applied AI Research & Technical Narrative, the content and research leads, and the founder. It sets output goals tied to the voice and verification bar and to measurable audience and citation reach.

Requirements

• You write to think. You can tell a true sentence from one that sounds like AI or a press release, and you will rewrite a paragraph several times until the argument is clean.
• You care about whether a claim is true as much as whether the hook works.
• You can go from a 30-minute talk with the founder or a product lead to a publish-ready draft the same day.
• You use AI tools heavily for research, outlines, claim checks, and repackaging, but you edit by hand so the final piece carries real voice and conviction.
• You have a body of published work with a pulse. That could be founder essays, a newsletter with a loyal readership, product storytelling at a technology or consumer company, or journalism that made complex systems clear. Writing samples and the reasoning behind them matter more than where you worked.
• This is not a fit if your approach is to have an LLM write the piece and publish it. It is also not a fit if you want to manage an agency or calendar from a distance rather than write and edit every week, or if you need two weeks and three committee reviews to ship a 1,000-word essay.
• You are happiest here if you want to write the pieces that shape how shoppers and builders think about verified commerce.

Conditions

Total first-year compensation is $250,000 to $350,000, made up of base salary plus target first-year ownership and profit-share.

Base salary is $160,000 to $210,000.

Target first-year ownership and profit-share is $90,000 to $140,000.

The base is based in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, on a hybrid schedule: four in-office half-days, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, from 9am to 2pm. Wednesdays and afternoons are open to work from wherever you work best.

Benefits

• Profit Interest Units give you a share in annual free-cash-flow distributions and tender liquidity. The units have a $0 strike price and are earned against performance milestones after you join. Nothing vests on day one.
• The company pays 100% of family medical, dental, and vision premiums.
• An AI tooling budget with no cap, directed by the return it produces.