Position Overview

You're the person at the party who introduces two strangers & watches them hit it off because of the solid introduction from you. You are well-respected because you can bring a group together, not because you throw around a job title. You stay up late when a new AI tool drops because you want to know what it can actually do, not what people tell you it’s going to change.

You’re rare, and you’re exactly what we’re looking for in our next Partnerships Manager & Content Ops lead at Contrarian Thinking. We’re hiring a person who can close a large brand deal, and hold the data that proves it’s a good move in the same hand.

You'll sell story-driven partnerships that are authentic to Contrarian Thinking and that brands want to be a part of. You'll close category partners (travel, auto, finance, luggage, lifestyle) on major deals. We’re past #ad reads & #sponsoredposts, and you are too. You’re ready to be in the room with Fortune 1000 CMOs and sell our story alongside theirs as a natural arc.

You'll also help build an AI-powered system that tells us which stories actually move the audience. You’ll be the conduit between content and all internal departments, and build an AI content system thanks to data within our sales, finance, marketing teams. You’re comfortable with a wide swath of analytic tools & use it to get answers on the big questions, even though the answer might change every day. You’re the go-to resource for knowing what content drives the highest click-through, which ones convert to paid, which formats compound. Nobody in the companies where your friends work have built something cross-departmentally at this scale yet. You get to shape it.

Why This Job Is Important

Most media companies treat brand partnerships as a tax on audience attention. A brand pays, the content suffers, the audience tolerates it. We are building the opposite. The partnerships we close make the content better, not worse.

Our company owns conversion data across Sales, Marketing, Ops, Content, Advisory, and Finance. We need someone who can dive in, interpret it & and close the loop between what the business knows and what the audience sees.

This role ensures every piece of content converts and every partnership is a natural extension of our company.

What Your Days Will Look Like

Brand Partnerships

• Pitch, close, and shepherd partnerships from first meeting through campaign execution. Build relationships with brand-side VPs and their agencies.
• Develop big-idea creative concepts CT can bring to Fortune 500 brands. Think story arcs and multi-touch integrations, not a single sponsored post.
• Sell the team internally on those ideas before they ever go to the brand.
• Run the followthrough loop with partners. Be a good steward to outside partners yet able to protect our own voice in reviews & feedback cycles. Be a confident voice and willing to push back on aggressive notes & final approvals.
• Protect creative integrity without torching the relationship.

Content Operations

• Be the conduit between content and all internal departments. Build a standing rhythm with Sales, Marketing, Advisory, Events, and Finance. Find out what their data is telling them and translate that into content ideas. Be a filter for what is happening internally and how we use it to tell our own brand story externally.
• Operate the Content Brain. Refine the data workflows that pull from Google Analytics, HubSpot, Avoma, platform APIs, Bitly, transcripts, and social data. Turn those signals into answers: which hooks retain, which frameworks convert, which formats compound.
• Be on top of our customer facing event calendar and ensure all platforms are aware of what event they are driving promotions to, the appropriate messaging and the cadence of messaging.
• Build and maintain the dashboards the content team actually uses. Weekly: views, watch time, CTR, retention, revenue per asset, partnership ROI.
• Map the full path from idea to brief to script to production to publish to repurpose. Build the templates, checklists, and SLAs so nothing gets rebuilt from scratch.
• Prep leadership for key strategy changes with short briefs that give context, options, your recommendation backed by data.
• Sit in on enough sales calls and advisor calls to understand the real language the company uses and funnel it to content teams so they can translate it to our audience.

What This Role Is (and Is Not)

This role is:

• Behind the scenes supporting the goals of Contrarian Thinking & Codie Sanchez.
• Strategic and operational, in equal measure
• High-autonomy, high-ownership
• AI-forward. 85% of the job can be done through interactions with systems you will be vocal in building. The rest of the job relies on a high emotional-intelligence with partner relationships, creative judgment, and cross-team trust.
• Cross-functional. You will talk to every department in the company.

This role is not:

• A transactional brand deals role
• A pure producer role
• Creative director for content
• An on-camera creator role

What We're Looking For

• 5-7 years experience in brand partnerships, ad agency account direction, brand management, or content ops at a creator-led media company. Bonus for a blended background.
• Proven track record closing or managing brand deals, preferably category partnerships rather than one-offs.
• You can walk into a Fortune 500 boardroom with a creative pitch and come out with a signed deal.
• Fluency with AI tools as a thinking multiplier, not a drafting assistant. You've chained LLMs to explore angles, compress research, and override outputs with taste.
• Comfortable inside data. Google Analytics, HubSpot, platform analytics, or equivalent. You don't need to be a data scientist, but you need to read a retention curve and know what it means.
• Single source of truth energy. People come to you for "what's real" and "what's next."
• Diplomatic spine. You can say "this isn't good enough yet" to the production team and "we won't do that" to a brand without drama.
• Low ego, high standards.
• Clear, concise writer. Briefs that people can read & digest.
• Bias toward action. You fix problems before they become meetings.

What You Will Learn On This Job

• How to build category-level partnerships with Fortune 500 brands, from first pitch through multi-year renewal. You'll negotiate directly with brand marketing leads and their agencies.
• How to operate and refine an AI-powered content intelligence system. This is early. You will shape how the content team evolves with AI.
• How to translate first-party audience data into product strategy.
• How a modern creator-led media company actually works. The parts that scale, the parts we’re still building, and the parts nobody else has figured out yet.

What Success Looks Like

• At least two signed category partnerships (travel, auto, finance, or lifestyle) within 12 months, structured for multi-year renewal.
• Partnership-integrated content consistently matches or outperforms non-sponsored content on retention and engagement. Brand deals stop feeling like a tax on the audience.
• The content calendar is visible, current, and trusted. No one is asking "what's shipping this week."
• Answers to real questions. "Which hook format drives the highest masterclass CTR" has an answer, not a hypothesis.

Location

Full-time, in-office role at our Austin, Texas headquarters. Applicants must reside within a 1-hour drive of Austin or be willing to relocate.

Benefits

• 100% company-paid health, dental, and vision
• 100% company-paid short and long-term disability, life, and accident insurance
• Unlimited PTO plus 8 paid holidays
• Option to enroll in a 401(k) plan via Vestwell with competitive match options
• Free access to all Contrarian Thinking programs and flagship communities

How to Apply

Send a resume plus a short Loom with visual info to explain:

1. Share visuals from a brand partnership you closed or managed that you're proud of. What was the creative idea, what was the deal structure, and how did it perform? What was your role throughout the process?
2. An AI content process, workflow, or dashboard you built. What was broken, what you changed, and the before/after. Walk us through it in your loom & show us how it works.