AI-First Marketing Lead (m/w/d) - Remote

refive is building the engagement layer for physical retail: digital receipts, QR/NFC touchpoints, and post-purchase journeys that help brands and retailers turn anonymous shoppers into known customers. We work with retailers like Puma, EuroShop, and Orlen and are scaling fast across Europe and beyond. We are a close-knit team, distributed across three continents, with a base in Berlin. We're building an AI powered startup, flat heirarchy and a tight, efficient team.

This is a Head of Marketing operating model inside a lean-team structure. You own the entire marketing function: strategy, content, SEO, events, partner co-marketing, and brand, and you run most of it through AI-powered workflows and agentic automation rather than headcount.

The bar is high: you need to zoom from annual content strategy to line-level copy review to prompting a new automation pipeline - and know which mode each situation calls for. We move in sprints, ship fast, and never let perfect be the enemy of good.

Tasks

• AI content engine: Design, prompt, and maintain agentic pipelines that produce LinkedIn content for founders, blog posts, and SEO copy at scale. You set direction and review quality - AI does the production. This is already partially built; you evolve and own it.

• Account-based marketing support: Align the content calendar with live pipeline priorities & outbound campaigns. Brief assets for key accounts. Make sure sales has what it needs, when it needs it - not generic collateral.

• SEO and inbound: Own organic growth. Blog strategy, keyword targeting, distribution playbook, conversion path optimisation. AI produces content at speed; your judgment ensures it converts.

• Brand and thought leadership: Evolve the Retail Spotlight podcast into a content ecosystem. Ghostwrite and direct founder voice content. Build refive's presence as the authoritative voice on in-store customer engagement in Europe.

• Events and field: Manage trade-fair participation (NRF, EuroShop, RTS London and similar) - logistics, pre/post content, lead capture workflows.

• Partner co-marketing: Work with partner management to develop joint campaigns and launch materials with white-label and integration partners as the pipeline scales.

• Metrics and reporting: Own the automated weekly marketing dashboard (GA4, HubSpot, LinkedIn). Know your numbers. Flag what is not working before anyone asks.

Requirements

• 6-8 years of B2B SaaS or tech marketing experience, with real ownership - not just execution support.

• You have run campaigns end to end and have results to show.

• Fluent, flawless native spokend and written english

• Agentic automation fluency. You have built or designed workflows using tools like n8n, Make, Zapier, or similar. You are comfortable prompting LLMs for structured outputs and wiring them into repeatable pipelines. This is not a nice-to-have it is how this role operates day to day.

• Strategic range with execution instinct. You can write a marketing plan in the morning and review a CTA in the afternoon. You know when to go deep and when to move on.

• Content quality instinct. You can tell the difference between AI-generated content that performs and content that just sounds like it was AI-generated. You write well yourself - sharp, no fluff, B2B-appropriate.

• Modern mindset, not stuck in old-school playbooks. Curious about what new tools can do, comfortable with ambiguity, willing to try things that have no case study yet - but experienced enough to know what good looks like and push back when a shortcut will cost you later.

• HubSpot and GA4 proficiency. You track what matters and use data to change direction, not validate decisions already made.

• Retail or martech experience is a genuine plus — if you understand how brick-and-mortar retailers think about footfall, loyalty, and first-party data, you will ramp faster and produce better work.

• One or more European language skills are a significant bonus given our primary market. But not a must have.

Benefits

• End-to-end ownership of a marketing function with real enterprise customers and a clear growth path

• The chance to build and document an AI-first lean marketing playbook - a genuinely novel problem

• Attractive compensation package and options after year 1

• Training budget and access to the latest AI tooling

• Direct access to the founding team and meaningful strategic input from day one

• Work from home or Goa or the mountains, wherever you want as long as you have a perfect internet connection

We use heavy agentic automation across content, research, and reporting. This role is not about doing more with less, it is about designing systems that handle the repeatable work so human judgment goes where it actually matters. If that excites you, you will fit here. If you prefer full manual control over every deliverable, this is probably not the right environment.

To apply, send your CV plus responses to both tasks below. No cover letter needed. Applications without both tasks completed will not be reviewed.

• Task 1: Editorial eye. Here is a LinkedIn post a retail tech founder drafted but never published: "Excited to share that we've just launched our new in-store customer engagement solution that helps retailers leverage data-driven insights to optimize their omnichannel strategy and drive meaningful ROI across touchpoints. This is a game-changer for the industry. #retail #innovation #customerexperience." Rewrite it. Then tell us in two sentences what was wrong with the original.

• Task 2: Systems thinking. We publish a new blog post every two weeks. Sketch the automation workflow you would build to turn each post into a week of LinkedIn content across two founder accounts. Cover: triggers, tools, prompts, and, critically, what a human reviews and when. A rough diagram or a numbered list of steps both work. We are not looking for a perfect answer. We are looking at how you think.