Responsibilities

• Global Communications Strategy: Own and execute Smartly’s global corporate and brand communications strategy across earned media, executive communications, thought leadership, analyst engagement, awards & industry influence.
• Speaking & Thought Leadership: Build and manage a strategic speaking program for Smartly executives, identifying and securing high-value opportunities across major industry events, conferences, podcasts, and other programs. Prepare executives for those moments through speechwriting, briefing materials, message development, rehearsal and media/speaker preparation.
• Narrative Development: Maintain a clear, differentiated corporate narrative and messaging architecture that connects Smartly’s company strategy, product innovation, customer impact and market POV across PR, events, executive communications & GTM programs.
• Revenue-Driven Event Strategy: Reorient the Global Events team (led by Stephanie Karlas) from administrative logistics coordinators into commercial powerhouses. Align event goals around clean real-time registration data, strict daily budget tracking, and immediate post-event sales follow-up.
• Administrative Offloading: Ruthlessly protect the capacity of the event planning team. Transition all internal, non-marketing administrative event coordination (including Board of Directors meetings, executive dinners, internal SLT off-sites, and company All-Hands) completely out of the marketing department to Executive Assistants (REAs) and Workplace Experience teams.
• Creative Outsourcing: Implement a \"buy over build\" creative strategy for special events. Outsource event creative ideation and experience design to specialized external agencies, freeing internal events headcount to focus solely on operations, budget execution, and pipeline generation.
• Comms Ops, AI-Augmented Workflows & Agency In-Housing: Establish a Comms Ops Hub: Introduce a specialized \"Comms Ops\" capability to run the underlying technology, automation engines, and predictive analytics that power communications.
• AI-Augmented Content Pipelines: Work alongside the creative and copy teams to build AI-augmented content workflows. Automate repetitive asset repurposing, multi-market translations, and variation generation—aiming to reduce manual content-updating burdens by 50% to 75% while maintaining strict human-in-the-loop oversight to protect brand integrity.
• Optimize PR Retainer Spend: Actively in-house routine PR execution—such as media list building, first-draft pitches, and coverage clip tracking—using advanced AI tools. Reduce external PR agency retainer spend by 20% to 35%, reserving agency budget strictly for high-tier media pitching and crisis counsel.
• Case Study Automation & Customer Advocacy: End the \"Chasing\" Model: Overhaul the customer advocacy and case study lifecycle. Replace the highly manual, slow process of chasing Customer Success (CS) and clients with an automated, standardized case study pipeline.

Preferred

• Experience: 10+ years of progressive leadership experience in Corporate Communications, PR, Brand Marketing, or Comms Operations.
• Scale: Proven track record of scaling communications and branding departments in mid-sized B2B SaaS or digital media organizations (500–2,000 employees).
• Agency & Budget Management: Extensive experience managing large global PR agency retainers, contract execution, and outsourced creative operations.
• Transformation Track Record: Successful experience establishing a Hub-and-Spoke Center of Excellence model or transitioning traditional communications teams into automated, Comms Ops frameworks.
• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Communications, Journalism, Marketing, or an analytical business field. MBA or advanced training in Agile process frameworks is a strong plus.

Benefits

• Five weeks paid time off (PTO), 11 company paid holidays, unlimited sick days
• Generous healthcare packages & mental health benefits
• 401K plus matching & equity grants for all new Smartlies
• Wellness benefit & learning reimbursement opportunities
• Volunteer time off days & company donation matching opportunities
• And so much more…