Founding Marketer

About the Role

We're hiring our first-ever marketer. This is a founding role — you'll be the person who builds Ranger's growth engine from scratch, working directly with our founder Josh.

Our sales motion today is top-down, but engineers are the real champions inside their organizations and we recently released a fully self-serve product. Your job is to make Ranger impossible for developers to ignore: through content they actually want to read, channels that compound over time, and experiences that turn curiosity into conviction. You won't be handed a playbook. You're writing it.

There is no marketing team to inherit. No brand guidelines to follow. No "we've always done it this way." You'll own a number and figure out how to hit it. If that sounds more exciting than terrifying, keep reading.

What You'll Own

Content that developers actually want to read. Technical blog posts, tutorials, demo videos, case studies — not marketing fluff. We were cited in OpenAI's o3-mini research paper. You'd turn proof points like that into content that spreads organically through the developer community. You'll build a content engine that earns trust with engineers and positions Ranger as the obvious answer to the QA problem. Check out https://outpost.ranger.net/

Growth channels from zero. SEO targeting real developer pain points. Newsletter and podcast sponsorships. GitHub as a distribution channel. Paid campaigns when they make sense. You'll run experiments relentlessly, figure out what works, double down on it, and kill what doesn't. You'll own the full funnel from awareness through activation and know your numbers cold.

Events and creative experiments. No idea is too ambitious. Want to host a hackathon for AI agent developers? Ship a niche open-source tool? Run an ultra marathon for CTOs? Sponsor the weirdest possible conference booth? This is that kind of role. You'll represent Ranger at conferences, meetups, and developer events — and invent new ones.

Self-serve developer resources. Engineers discover and evaluate tools on their own before they ever talk to sales. You'll build the documentation, guides, interactive demos, and onboarding experiences that let developers find Ranger, try it, and become internal champions — all without a sales call.

Community and developer relationships. You'll become a known, trusted voice in the developer tooling ecosystem. You'll build relationships with engineering leaders, developer advocates at other companies, and technical influencers. When people think about QA for AI-era development, they should think of Ranger — and of you.

What We're Looking For

You're bright, enthusiastic, and relentlessly hardworking. This is a founding role at a company growing faster than we can keep up with. You need to be the kind of person who runs toward the chaos, not away from it.

You're technical. You don't need to be writing production code, but you should be able to read a Playwright test, understand a CI/CD pipeline, and talk to engineers without losing credibility. You've lived in the developer tools or infrastructure world and understand what makes technical buyers tick.

You're based in San Francisco (or willing to relocate). We work out of the Presidio 5 days a week. This role requires daily in-person collaboration.

You're excited about owning a metric. Not "contributing to brand awareness" — actually owning a number, building the system to hit it, and being accountable for results. You think in funnels, cohorts, and experiments, not campaigns and impressions.

You've built something from nothing before. Whether that's a company, a community, a content engine, or a growth channel — you've been in the zero-to-one seat and you know what it takes to create momentum without existing infrastructure.

You're a strong writer and communicator. The best developer marketing is indistinguishable from great content. You can write a blog post that gets shared on Hacker News, a tweet thread that goes viral, and a cold email that gets a reply — all in the same afternoon.

What Would Set You Apart

You're an ex-founder. 40% of Ranger is ex-founders and we'd love to work with more.

You have experience in developer relations, developer tools marketing, or growth at an early-stage startup.

You've built and scaled a content or community program that drove measurable pipeline.

You have a portfolio of technical writing, videos, or other content you're proud of.

You've worked with or marketed to engineering teams specifically.

You have experience with product-led growth motions.

What We Value

Getting back on defense for each other. No one at Ranger works on an island. When someone needs help or gets overwhelmed, we reach out rather than look to blame. We put the team above ourselves out of trust that our teammates would do the same.

Creative problem solving. We're an early-stage startup — everyone works together to solve problems even when it doesn't fall neatly within a job description. The best solution is often the one nobody expected.

Pride in your work. We care deeply about craftsmanship and the value it brings our customers. But we also believe in shipping — we prefer work to be live over perfect, and we find the right tradeoffs to get there.

What You Should Expect

An opportunity to define the function. You're not joining a marketing team. You're creating one. You'll have direct input into company strategy, positioning, and how Ranger shows up in the market.

A product that sells itself — when people know about it. Our customers love us. Your job is to make sure the right people find out.

Trust, respect, and responsibility. We treat one another as the full people we are and trust one another to make decisions in consideration of ourselves, our teammates, and the company.