Open role
AEODirector
Space (sp-ce.co) · Remote · Full-time
TL;DR
- —Space, an AI-native brand agency, is hiring an AEO Director to own answer engine optimization end to end: audits, implementation, content, and the citations that follow.
- —Brands gained a second audience (the models buyers ask before they ever search), and this role makes clients legible, credible, and cited in it.
- —The seat comes with Beacon, Space's own AEO product, and with implementation authority: no dashboards that end at the diagnosis.
- —Half the job is honesty: telling clients which tactics they've read about are theater, in writing.
- —Applying is three questions in a short form: one piece you shipped and now hate, the best idea you ever cut, and one thing in culture that makes you jealous.
01
About Space
Space is an AI-native brand agency. Three always-on leaders, 82 on-demand specialists, zero juniors. 127 agents, 362 agentic workflows, 14 tools we built ourselves. We ship brand identities, websites, campaigns, and products for funded companies in weeks: Validere got strategy, a full rebrand, and a new site in 8 weeks, lifted inbound 31%, and closed a $43M Series B on the story. We grow entirely by word of mouth, and we publish our AI rules, our hiring bar, and our pricing logic at sp-ce.co/notes, because an agency that won't tell you where AI stops is telling you it doesn't know.
02
The job
ChatGPT now writes your client's shortlist before any human types a query, from sources it chose, in a summary nobody can charm at a dinner. Brands gained a second audience: one that reads everything, remembers selectively, and cites whoever earned it. Earning it is this job.
AEO is drowning in its own gold rush: dashboards that display the problem, gurus selling tricks that expired last model update, and audits that end exactly where the work begins. You'll run the other kind. Space does AEO with implementation authority: crawlability, schema, entity consistency, content built for both audiences, and the infrastructure underneath, delivered, then measured in citations. We built Beacon, our own AEO product, and published an honest comparison against its competitors, including where they win. That's the posture this role inherits.
The craft has a discipline most channels never demanded: the machines reward what good editors always rewarded (clarity, structure, receipts, an author with a name), which means nothing here gets written for robots that would embarrass us in front of humans. You'll own the method, run the engagements, and publish what you learn under your name, because the notes you're reading are themselves the proof of method.
03
What you'll do
Run AEO engagements end to end: audit, prioritized implementation, content system, measurement, citations.
Own how brands read to models: entities, schema, structure, consistency, and the boring infrastructure that decides whether a crawler ever arrives.
Direct content that both audiences respect. The second audience reads everything; the first one still has to feel spoken to.
Wield Beacon on every engagement, and feed what the field teaches you back into the product.
Call the theater. Half your value is the written list of fashionable tactics a client should skip, with reasons.
Publish the method in the notes, under your name, because hiding the playbook is how the gurus stay employed.
04
What you won't do
Keyword-stuff, cloak, or chase this month's exploit. Tricks expire on someone else's release schedule; structure compounds.
Sell certainty in a probabilistic channel. You'll promise the inputs and the measurement, never a ranking.
Hand a client a dashboard and a handshake. Diagnosis without implementation is the failure this role exists to end.
Manage juniors. There are none. Nobody learns the craft on a client's budget here.
Sit in status meetings, log timesheets, or build spec work for pitches. The machines and the model retired all three.
05
Who you are
A veteran of search who watched the ground move: real SEO scars, and the humility to know which of those instincts transfer and which are dead weight.
Level 4 or above on our published AI Fluency Ladder, headed for 5: you test against the actual engines weekly, because the engines change weekly.
Technical enough to fix what you find: schema, rendering, crawl budgets, the unglamorous plumbing that decides visibility.
An editor at heart. You can tell content built to inform from content built to rank, and you've deleted plenty of the second kind.
A measurer. Citations, share of answer, pipeline influence: you know what's provable, what's directional, and you label each honestly.
06
Who you aren't
A guru. If your method can't survive publication, it isn't a method.
A volume merchant. A thousand pages of slop is now free, which is exactly what makes it worthless.
Level 2 on the ladder: someone who ships whatever the model returns. That's worse than not using AI at all, and we said so in print.
Anonymous. Your name goes on the method, and we treat that as the perk it is.
07 · No resume required
How to apply
No cover letter. No 90-page portfolio PDF. No resume upload, even. The application is three questions:
One piece of work you shipped and now hate, with the reason. Two hundred words max.
The best idea you ever cut, and why it was right to cut it.
One thing in culture right now that makes you jealous.
Use AI to answer if you like; we do. We'll be able to tell whether you reviewed it.
Comeargue.
Yes, this job description was drafted with AI. A named human rewrote it, cut a third of it, and will defend every line on a call. That's the entire model, and it's hiring.
Frequently asked questions
They share plumbing: crawlability, structure, authority. The reader changed. Search ranked pages for humans to choose between; answer engines choose for the human and cite selectively. Optimizing for a reader that synthesizes is a different editorial job, and we published the comparison.
No, and distrust anyone who does. We guarantee the inputs the engines reward and the measurement that proves movement.
Both, unapologetically. The role is real and open; the posting argues the model, because the model is the job.
Because the seat is sized to the person in it. You'll hear a real range in the first conversation, before you've invested anything beyond the three answers.
A named human reads all three answers. If they're real, we call you.