This week, we clocked 38,097 marketing roles open across the United States, up 10.5% from this time last year. Of those, 5,111 sit at the Director level and above, our “Senior Marketing Jobs” category, marking a 17.8% lift over last year. All told, marketing vacancies are holding steady, even as companies like Amazon ease back from the earlier dip.

What unites this week’s crop of roles? Infrastructure. Systems underneath modern business that nobody notices until they stop working.

OpenAI is trying to turn attention into an advertising economy. Rowspace is betting the future of financial AI depends on fixing the data layer beneath it. ID.me and Okta are making separate wagers on digital identity. Uber is looking for someone capable of defending long-term brand investment inside one of the world's most performance-obsessed organizations.

The closer a company gets to becoming infrastructure, the harder it becomes to explain - but we will have a go.

As a reminder - we are not the employer, nor agents of the employer, we just have thoughts.

First up, Rowspace.

Why would a company with $50M, elite founders, and 21 people suddenly decide they need marketer number one?

Rowspace is hiring its first Marketing Lead. They exist because you can’t expect to layer an LLM across creaky finance data and expect consistent and useful results.

The company emerged from stealth earlier this year with $50 million in combined Seed and Series A funding from Sequoia, Emergence Capital, Stripe, Basis Set and others. The founders are strong and credentialed. Michael Manapat previously led machine learning at Stripe and served as CTO at Notion. Yibo Ling held senior finance leadership roles at Uber and Binance. They met at MIT and arrived at their core thesis after experimenting with early LLMs inside financial workflows.

Their conclusion was that the intelligence layer gets most of the attention, but the harder problem lies beneath it. Financial institutions have decades of investment memos, diligence reports, management meeting notes, portfolio updates, CRM records, operating plans and proprietary research scattered across disconnected systems. Finance-native Rowspace is trying to organize that institutional knowledge….so it becomes a system of record for how decisions are made.

That helps explain why investors were willing to hand the founders $50 million before they hired marketer number one. Sequoia, Emergence, Stripe and Basis Set were effectively backing the notion that the data foundation beneath financial AI may become more important than the applications built on top of it.

The marketing role described is not your usual pancake. Founder credibility, product development and direct relationships appear to have carried the business through the first phase. Now the company needs someone capable of turning that early momentum into a repeatable motion.

The job description spends surprisingly little time discussing traditional marketing. Instead, it focuses on target account selection, warm introductions, executive dinners, content, product feedback loops, CRM instrumentation and relationship development. One sentence captures the philosophy neatly: "You'd rather reach the right ten people than broadcast to ten thousand."

The target buyer is the hardest part of the equation. Private equity CIOs and technology leaders have spent the last two years trapped in an endless carousel of AI briefings, vendor pitches, board conversations, pilot projects and steak dinners. Most have heard every version of "we are the intelligence layer" already, over and over. Rowspace arrives in a market where curiosity is no longer a thing - and you only get one shot to pitch ten ICPs.

Meanwhile, Rowspace remains a 21-person company competing for mindshare against much larger players with more resources, more trust, familiar logos, larger sales teams and existing relationships. Some prospective customers may decide the answer lives inside Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI or the like. Others may decide the answer must be built internally. We have agents now, why not?

The hiring pattern offers another clue about how the founders think. Team members come from companies including Finley, Imprint, Retool, Phind, Assembled, Basis Set and Logik.ai. These are businesses that typically win through product depth, technical credibility, relationships and patient account development.

If Taligence had this assignment, we'd spend time looking for people who have sold complicated products to skeptical buyers. The overlap between financial services credibility, AI fluency, founder-stage adaptability and relationship-driven selling is narrow and intimidating.

One line made me smile:

"One day you may be printing nametags, the next hosting a client for F1."

That is consistent with the rest of the brief. Reads more like an operating principle.

The founders have already convinced Sequoia, Emergence, Stripe and Basis Set. Convincing a handful of private equity CIOs may be harder.

OpenAI runs three businesses at once.

One business is trying to convince enterprises to build OpenAI into core workflows. Another is trying to make ChatGPT indispensable enough that consumers keep returning, upgrading and paying. The third is now emerging: convincing advertisers, agencies and brand partners that OpenAI deserves a place in their budgets beyond an experiment.

A few weeks ago, I sat down with Ad Age to discuss the reported appointment of Colin Fleming as Chief Marketing Officer, Business. That role looked focused on enterprise adoption. This one, sits much closer to the balance sheet.

Recent PitchBook analysis painted a picture of a company with extraordinary reach, extraordinary adoption and great expectations. It also raised a question that increasingly follows OpenAI around: can the economics ever justify the valuation?

Agencies are everywhere in this brief. Strategic brand partners. Cannes Lions, CES, Advertising Week and DMEXCO all show up. OpenAI wants someone capable of shaping industry narratives, building executive relationships, creating advertiser proof points, supporting complex sales motions and establishing OpenAI as a trusted platform for marketers.

The repeated references to agencies, advertisers, strategic brand partners, measurement, attribution and buying audiences suggest OpenAI understands that winning advertisers once is only part of the challenge. Winning the advertising ecosystem for the long haul is more important. This is a very different assignment from the Colin Fleming hire.

Enterprise buyers care about governance, security, integration and procurement. Advertisers care about audiences, outcomes, attribution, measurement, creative effectiveness, budget allocation and whether clients want to go on a first date or get married.

The talent pool options are fascinating.

Most people will immediately look toward Google Ads, Meta, Amazon Ads, TikTok, Uber Ads, DoorDash Ads, Instacart and retail media networks. Fair enough. Personally, I think some of the strongest candidates may come from media agency leadership. Large advertisers rarely commit meaningful budget because a platform publishes a clever case study. Budgets move when agencies, measurement partners, procurement teams and senior marketers become certain that the platform will be around for the long haul.

That's why this brief reads to me like “diplomacy for Madison Avenue.” An Amanda Richman, Brian Gleason or Sharb Farjami hire makes sense.

Google spent many years convincing advertisers that search deserved budget. Meta spent many years proving social could drive business outcomes. Amazon had to persuade brands that commerce data could become media inventory. OpenAI appears to be entering its own version of that conversation, but they have a ticking IPO clock. Tick, tock.

For now at least, the founders have already convinced users to spend time on ChatGPT. Colin Fleming the new B2B CMO, is tasked with convincing enterprises to build on it. This role exists because somebody now has to convince advertisers to fund it.

If PitchBook is directionally correct, that conversation may ultimately prove more important than either.

ID.me is hiring a Head of Integrated Marketing. I only know about them because I have to use them to access my Social Security data.

Almost all trust infrastructure succeeds by disappearing into the background – think about ServiceNow, Visa, Cloudflare.

Identity verification, authentication and fraud prevention tend to be noticed only when they fail (for me, Okta, I still have bad dreams). ID.me appears to be moving in the opposite direction.

The company serves more than 152 million users and sits at the intersection of government, healthcare, ecommerce and identity verification. Its customers include federal agencies, state governments, healthcare organizations and hundreds of consumer brands. The people interacting with the platform include veterans, first responders, teachers, students and everyday consumers.

Most marketing organizations spend their time trying to simplify audiences. ID.me seems to be adding them.

That complexity shows up throughout the JD. The role owns everything from cultural activations and influencer partnerships to executive thought leadership, brand partnerships and category development. At the same time, it is expected to support transaction growth, enterprise relationships and government credibility. Quite a lot for $185K….

ID.me hired former Google and Coinbase executive Gary Sun as CMO earlier this year. His background leans heavily toward growth, adoption and scaling consumer platforms. This write-up feels like his. Rather than focusing on acquisition alone, this brief points toward partnerships, cultural relevance, community engagement and category development. The new CMO appears to be building out parts of the marketing organization that help turn trust into affinity.

Consumers generally don't spend much time thinking about authentication, credentialing or fraud prevention until something goes wrong. Yet AI is making impersonation easier and digital trust more valuable. ID.me is betting that identity is shifting from invisible infrastructure into a category people will perhaps even ‘care’ about and actively discuss.

But visibility and trust don't always move together.

The more visible a company becomes, the more scrutiny it attracts. Questions around privacy, security, data stewardship and government relationships inevitably follow. Building cultural relevance around ID is quite different from building cultural relevance around sneakers, soft drinks or streaming services.

Plenty of marketers understand consumer partnerships. Plenty understand government stakeholders. Plenty understand regulated industries. Very few have spent meaningful time operating across all three (I’d be stuck to name one, and I meet 800 marketers every year). Government technology, healthcare, cybersecurity, fintech and trust-sensitive consumer businesses all feel like relevant hunting grounds.

The compensation range is also revealing. At roughly $185K-$213K, this doesn't feel like a search for Jonathan Mildenhall. It feels much more like a search for an operator capable of building systems, partnerships and narratives in a category that remains unfamiliar to many of us.

ID.me has scale. It already has government credibility. It already has enterprise adoption.

Under Gary Sun, the new CMO, the company now appears to be investing in something different: A category people understand.

This role exists because the company appears to have concluded that trust alone is no longer enough. The next phase requires relevance.

Whether those two goals can grow together is one of the more interesting marketing experiments in digital identity.