Freelance Architectural Researcher Jobs (NOW HIRING)

Marketing at Step runs on data. Every acquisition channel, lifecycle campaign, rewards drop, and measurement decision depends on clean, connected, well-modeled data flowing between our product, our warehouse, and a dozen marketing platforms. Today, much of that work lands on engineering. We're hiring a Director, Marketing Technology, to own it end-to-end.

This is a deeply technical, hands-on role for someone with a software or data engineering background who wants to apply that skill set to growth. You'll be the architect and operator of Step's marketing technology stack: owning our ad channel and attribution integrations, managing our vendor ecosystem (Segment, AppsFlyer, Braze, Funnel, and others), building the data models and analytical tooling the marketing team runs on, and shipping the monthly rewards and offers that drive engagement. You'll act as the bridge between Marketing, Product, and Engineering, taking on the technical work that currently pulls engineers away from the core product, and raising the bar on what marketing can measure, automate, and personalize.

You'll start as a hands-on individual contributor with the opportunity to build and lead a marketing technology team as the function scales.

Search is changing, and the next generation turns to ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini before they Google. Organic discovery across traditional search and AI platforms is one of Step's biggest priorities, and this role owns it end-to-end.

As our SEO & LLM Content Manager on the Marketing team, you'll be both strategist and builder. You'll own the Money 101 blog and its daily publishing engine; writing content yourself and orchestrating freelancers and AI-assisted workflows to scale output without sacrificing quality. You'll drive SEO/AEO/GEO across step.com, build our authority through backlinks and digital PR, and make Step the answer when millions of people ask a search engine, or AI, how to build credit, open a first bank account, or what the best banking platform is. You'll also bring search discipline to our social channels, especially YouTube, turning video into a durable organic acquisition engine.

In your first year, success looks like: a consistent daily publishing cadence on Money 101, measurable growth in organic traffic and AI-platform citations, a technical foundation on step.com that search engines and LLMs can fully crawl and understand, and a YouTube presence optimized to rank in both video and traditional search.

• Own SEO across step.com: on-page optimization, site architecture, internal linking, Core Web Vitals, and regular technical audits, partnering with web engineering to ship fixes
• Drive the Money 101 blog end to end: editorial strategy, keyword and topic research, the daily content calendar, and publishing, writing high-quality personal finance content yourself and managing freelance and AI-assisted production to scale volume and ongoing content audits, refreshing, consolidating, or pruning underperforming pages
• Optimize content for LLM and AI-search visibility (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews): structured data and schema, content formats that answer engines cite, and tracking how AI platforms retrieve and attribute Step's content
• Build Step's authority through backlink acquisition and digital PR, earning links and citations from personal finance publishers, media, and data-driven content
• Optimize Step's social channels for search, predominantly YouTube: titles, descriptions, chapters, metadata, and content strategy that ranks in YouTube and Google video results
• Partner closely with the Performance and Affiliate teams to optimize ad and affiliate content
• Establish E-E-A-T signals appropriate for a financial brand, including author profiles, expert review, and sourcing standards, while partnering with legal/compliance so all content meets financial-marketing requirements
• Own organic performance reporting: rankings, traffic, conversions, and AI citation share

• 4+ years in SEO and content, with at least one role owning both strategy and hands-on execution at a consumer app, fintech, or growth-stage startup
• A strong writer and editor who can produce polished, accurate personal finance content daily and enforce a quality bar across freelance and AI-assisted output
• Demonstrated results growing organic traffic: keyword strategy, on-page and technical SEO, and content that ranks
• Working knowledge of answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) - how LLMs and AI search platforms select, summarize, and cite sources - and hands-on experimentation with optimizing for them"
• Experience with YouTube SEO or video content optimization
• Fluent with the modern SEO toolkit: Ahrefs or SEMrush, Google Search Console, GA4, and schema/structured data
• Comfortable running backlink and digital PR campaigns that earn authoritative links
• Self-directed and organized - able to run a daily publishing operation, a technical roadmap, and experiments simultaneously without dropping the ball

• Personal finance or fintech experience
• Familiarity with Contentful and light HTML/CSS; enough technical fluency to work closely with engineers

Location: Remote (US) or San Mateo, CA, with occasional travel for team offsites and key meetings

Reports to: Chief Marketing Officer

Education: Bachelor's degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and experience 

We encourage you to apply even if you don't meet every single qualification. Strong candidates rarely check every box, and we'd rather meet you than miss you.