There’s limited comfort in a layoff report that’s merely bad rather than catastrophic, but here we are.

The latest Challenger report for April delivered exactly that. Year-to-date layoffs are down 50% compared to last year. Strip out the 290,117 DOGE-related cuts announced last year by the end of April, and the private sector picture looks steadier still, with YTD layoffs down 10% year-over-year. Hiring plans, however, are still moving in the wrong direction, down 13% from the same period last year.

Why the layoffs? For the second consecutive month, AI was the leading cause of layoffs, responsible for 26% of April’s total cuts. In some cases, companies are replacing jobs outright with AI tools; in most others, they’re shifting budgets away from headcount and into infrastructure, chips, and data centres. Others are AI-washing, hoping for a pump in their equities.

Meta is perhaps the clearest example. Since last May, Zuckerberg has continued reshaping the company through repeated rounds of layoffs and restructuring. The latest cuts affect 10% of Meta’s global workforce and cancel roughly 6,000 planned roles, while the company simultaneously plans to spend up to $135 billion on AI infrastructure this year in pursuit of what it calls “personal superintelligence” for its 3.5 billion daily users. It’s a stark illustration of where priorities and budgets are heading.

What’s particularly interesting in the Challenger data is where the impact is being felt most. Washington, Michigan, Texas, and Georgia have all seen significantly higher job cuts this year, while states like New York and New Jersey have improved sharply compared to last year. California still leads the country in total layoffs, though even there cuts are down 39% year-over-year.

And yet, amid all the AI anxiety and restructuring headlines, marketing appears to be holding up surprisingly well.

Data from Aspen Technology Labs shows 39,248 in-house marketing jobs currently open across the US, up 11.6% year-over-year. Director-level and above roles are up an even stronger 20.9% (currently at 5,167 in total). That’s especially notable given the overall US job growth softened by 2.1% in Aspen’s latest quarterly report.

Compared to much of the broader market, marketing is showing real signs of resilience.

Which raises an interesting question: were marketers simply among the first groups to absorb the AI shock? After two years of automation panic, hiring freezes, and endless “AI-first” strategies, perhaps the market is beginning to stabilize.

This week, alongside the US roles, we’re also featuring four particularly interesting opportunities across Asia. For anyone with one eye on life beyond American borders, or simply curious where the global market is heating up, our premium subscription also includes access to a running list of the highest-paying US marketing jobs posted within the last 30 days.

As a reminder, the roles we cover here are for your entertainment only. We are not agents of the employer, nor are we the employer. ^{For more legal anecdotes, go here.}

New York University is hiring a nearly half-million-dollar operator to protect one of America’s most valuable exports: elite educational prestige.

While many U.S. universities grapple with demographic decline, visa friction, political hostility, and skepticism about the ROI of expensive degrees, NYU remains the top U.S. host for international students, with more than 27,500 across its global system. Yet the ground beneath higher education is moving quickly: new international student enrollment across the U.S. fell 17% in 2025, the sharpest non-pandemic decline in more than a decade, driven largely by visa bottlenecks and geopolitical anxiety.

Officially, this is an enrollment marketing role. It’s really a search for someone capable of protecting and extending the global appeal of “Brand NYU” during a bumpier era for American higher education.

Reporting to MJ Knoll-Finn, Senior Vice President for Global Enrollment, Student Success, and Strategic Positioning, the incoming leader enters a system in which enrollment resembles a fusion of consulting, financial planning, behavioral science, and diplomacy. Inside the division, specialists oversee predictive modeling, yield optimization, financial aid simulation engines, segmentation strategy, lifecycle analytics, and global positioning. One longtime strategist references “class composition,” “discount rates,” and “advanced predictive modeling” with the language of an airline revenue manager; another oversees net revenue models and financial aid allocation across NYU’s undergraduate schools like a portfolio allocator balancing prestige, diversity, and yield.

A skim of the LinkedIn profiles reveals how deeply NYU has industrialized enrollment management.

You will arrive after the math layer has already been built: the dashboards, the modeling, the optimization. What NYU now needs is someone capable of unifying institutional ambition into a coherent global story across international families, first-generation students, rankings bodies, alumni, faculty, donors, and governments simultaneously.

The job description swings between “ROI analysis,” “benchmarking,” and “revenue ambitions,” then pivots back to “purpose,” “community,” and “student success.” NYU wants someone who can manage enrollment with hedge-fund-grade rigor while preserving the emotional legitimacy of higher education as an aspiration, a site of transformation, and a source of mobility.

And then there’s New York itself. For many international students, NYU and New York are inseparable in the decision-making process. Immigration uncertainty, political polarization, affordability concerns, and safety perceptions all now influence enrollment behavior alongside rankings and academic quality. The university’s global campus structure helps reduce some of that exposure, while also creating the challenge of maintaining a consistent institutional identity across very different regions and audiences

If Taligence had this search, we would avoid the traditional university CMO circuit. Instead, we would look toward operators from institutions like Soho House or Mastercard, where global membership economics, international audience management, and brand-trust diplomacy sit at the center of the business model.

To win this interview, you need to know that NYU already knows how to market programs. The greater challenge is sustaining global desirability for an elite American institution amid cultural distrust.

The future of elite higher education likely belongs to institutions capable of behaving like universities, global brands, and soft-power networks. This hire suggests NYU already understands where the market is heading.

NVIDIA is hiring a marketer to explain GPUs, AI infrastructure, and accelerated computing to government officials.

The company’s new “Senior Director, Policy Marketing” role is one of the clearest examples yet of marketing expanding beyond consumers, enterprise buyers, and developers into something closer to geopolitical translation. The mandate is this: help governments understand why NVIDIA should sit at the center of their national AI strategies, industrial policies, and economic security frameworks.

The language inside the posting is remarkable. NVIDIA wants someone capable of building narratives around “economic growth,” “digital infrastructure,” “national security,” and “administration goals,” while also helping heads of state, regulators, and policymakers understand the strategic value of the company’s ecosystem. Wow.

The role reflects how AI infrastructure is increasingly being discussed in terms of economic competitiveness, industrial policy, and national ambition, not just software adoption or dev ecosystems.

The posting also admits how politically sensitive the environment has become. Candidates are expected to understand export controls, chip acts, data residency laws, and the geopolitical implications of AI. Another line references the ability to connect global political developments directly to “marketing strategies and revenue opportunities.”

That may be the most revealing sentence in the entire posting.

NVIDIA is now a strategic AI‑infrastructure player with significant policy and geopolitical weight. It sits inside debates around sovereign compute capacity, industrial independence, trade restrictions, strategic infrastructure, and public trust in AI.

The timing matters too. NVIDIA has dramatically expanded its Washington presence over the last year while simultaneously seeking to preserve access to China, which remains one of the most important long-term AI infrastructure markets in the world. Jensen Huang has publicly argued that overly aggressive export controls may ultimately accelerate China’s domestic semiconductor ecosystem rather than contain it. Meanwhile, Chinese firms continue to invest heavily in alternative AI hardware ecosystems amid sanctions and restrictions. That creates a delicate balancing act.

NVIDIA must position itself as strategically aligned with U.S. national interests while trying  to operate inside a deeply global technology market where governments increasingly want domestic capability, local infrastructure, and reduced dependency on foreign platforms.

And increasingly, governments are navigating something else as well: rising public anxiety around AI concentration, labor disruption and energy. That helps explain why the role emphasizes “demystifying” AI and positioning NVIDIA as a responsible, long-term partner in national development.

The reporting relationships inside the posting are revealing as well. The role partners directly with Global Affairs, Legal, Communications, Marketing, and government-facing teams, reinforcing what this is. Coordinated narrative management.

Even the compensation hints at the importance of the role. At up to $460,000 before equity, NVIDIA is paying at a level not normally seen for public affairs support functions.

If Taligence had this search, we would avoid traditional B2B technology marketers entirely. The more interesting talent pools sit closer to strategic infrastructure and institutional persuasion: operators from Palantir, Qualcomm, or global consulting and advisory environments where policy, economic competitiveness, and enterprise technology already intersect.

To win this interview, candidates would need to demonstrate far more than communications polish or government affairs experience. NVIDIA already knows how to explain technical performance. The harder challenge is helping governments understand where accelerated computing fits into their economic future, industrial resilience, and geopolitical positioning.

The role title says “Policy Marketing.” In practice, this is closer to strategic infrastructure diplomacy for the AI era.

Superhuman is hiring a product marketer to help turn a growing collection of AI productivity products into a coherent enterprise story.

Easier said than done.

Following the combination of Grammarly, Coda, Mail, and Go under the broader Superhuman umbrella, this role increasingly looks less like traditional product marketing and more like portfolio narrative architecture. The job description repeatedly references “connective tissue,” “cross-product solution narratives,” and packaging multiple capabilities into buyer-ready enterprise stories. That’s the tell.

The AI industry spent the last several years selling model intelligence itself. Now, many enterprise software companies are confronting a harder commercial problem: helping organizations understand where AI truly fits inside day-to-day workflows without creating fear, confusion, governance concerns, or operational chaos.

The company wants someone capable of translating a sprawling AI productivity stack into something coherent for enterprise buyers, IT leaders, admins, CISOs, and procurement committees, all at once. As we have repeatedly seen in Anthropic postings for marketers recently, this is enterprise trust management.

One line in particular jumps out: “Own Security, Privacy, and Trust as a product marketing capability.”  This sentence tells you exactly where enterprise AI adoption now sits psychologically. Companies know AI is impressive. They want to know if Employees will trust it, legal will approve it, security will tolerate it, and its use will become a habit.

The role also reflects how culturally immersive AI has become inside parts of the software industry itself. The posting explicitly asks for candidates who are “AI-pilled” and using AI tools “daily (hourly)” to get their jobs done. Five years ago, that line would have sounded cracked in a senior enterprise marketing search. Today, it functions almost as an identity signal.

At the same time, the JD repeatedly pulls itself back toward practical business outcomes: adoption, retention, expansion, purchasing confidence, and buyer enablement. The market appears to be moving away from abstract AI capability demos and toward workflow utility.

From where I’ve been sitting in China over the last month, the contrast is especially interesting. In much of the U.S. AI ecosystem, the narrative often centers around the model itself. In China, the emphasis more often sits around application utility and product integration. The value is expected to reveal itself through usage rather than vision alone. Superhuman’s challenge may ultimately be bridging those two worlds inside enterprise software: maintaining excitement around AI capability while grounding it in practical workflow outcomes that feel trustworthy and durable.

The reporting structure is revealing as well. This role sits directly at the intersection of Product, Sales, Customer Success, Revenue Marketing, and Analyst Relations. That’s a lot of stakeholders.

If Taligence had this search, we would avoid pure messaging strategists or traditional PMMs coming from single-product SaaS companies. The more interesting profiles would come from operators who have helped enterprise organizations absorb platform transitions: leaders from Atlassian, Notion, Adobe, or collaboration ecosystems where product sprawl, workflow integration, governance, and enterprise trust collide.

To win this interview, you’re going to need more than “I use AI hourly”

Superhuman already knows how to generate excitement. The harder challenge is helping enterprise buyers feel that AI productivity software can become operationally dependable. Underneath the language around agents and workflows, this is ultimately a search for someone capable of making enterprise AI feel normal.