Open role
BrandStrategist
Space (sp-ce.co) · Remote · Full-time
TL;DR
- —Space, an AI-native brand agency, is hiring a Brand Strategist to own positioning on client engagements, working directly beside Sarah Masel.
- —The method is pain-first: strategy dug out of lost-deal notes, call transcripts, tickets, and churn interviews in week one, then aimed, not framed.
- —One recommendation ships, creative starts on it within days, and the market grades the thinking with the strategist's name on it.
- —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
A shocking share of six-figure strategy engagements end at diagnosis: the pain gets named, brilliantly, on a slide titled Insights, and then the creative proceeds as if the slide never existed. We wrote about that failure in public, and this role exists to never commit it. You'll dig positioning out of the places a market writes its honest opinions (lost deals, sales calls, tickets, competitor one-stars, churn interviews), aim the whole brand at the sharpest pain you find, and then stay in the room while creative makes it true, because here strategy meets design in days, not quarters.
The machines compress the archaeology: what took a research team six weeks, our agents surface before your second coffee. What they can't do is sit across from a founder at the moment the real problem gets admitted, or choose which of five true insights deserves the whole brand. One of our first principles is "go straight at the pain." You're that principle with a job title.
03
What you'll do
Run the week-one dig on every engagement: lost-deal notes, call recordings, tickets, competitor reviews, churn interviews, verbatim.
Write positioning that a target customer reads with recognition, the "finally, someone said it" test, and cut everything that earns polite agreement instead.
Present one recommendation. Sometimes two, when a genuine strategic fork exists. Never three.
Stay through creative: every design review has the strategy in the room, defending the aim or updating it out loud.
Grade yourself against the market: positioning gets scored on pipeline and message pull-through after launch, under your name.
04
What you won't do
Ship a sixty-slide deck. The thinking here is judged by what a stranger repeats back, never by page count.
Point at pain from a safe distance. Naming a problem is a slide; aiming a brand at one is the job, and only the second one is yours.
Run workshops as research. A workshop surfaces what a company believes about itself; the truth lives outside the building, and you'll go get it.
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
Senior, with positions that shipped and moved a number: pipeline, win rate, pricing power, the receipts.
Level 4 or above on our published AI Fluency Ladder: the agents do your archaeology, and you QA every artifact they hand you.
Evidence-hungry. You'd trade ten frameworks for one honest churn interview, and you've done the interviews yourself.
A ruthless editor of your own insights. Five things can be true; one gets the brand, and you can defend letting the other four go.
Comfortable being graded. Your strategy meets the market in weeks, with your name attached, and you prefer it that way.
06
Who you aren't
A framework merchant. If the deliverable is the pyramid diagram, the client bought a poster.
Aspiration-first. Positioning built from the vision down evaporates on contact with a buyer, and we said so in print.
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 thinking, 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
Beside, never under. One strategist owns each engagement end to end; Sarah leads the discipline and takes her own. Two-person debates happen constantly. Sign-off committees don't.
A week of digging in real evidence beats a quarter of workshops, and pain moves fast enough that the six-month version documents last year's market. We published the method.
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.