The marketing world has a habit of turning every damn job into the same damn job: Brand, Growth,  Digital, Demand…the nouns shuffle a bit, but the verbs are always the same: drive, scale, optimize, deliver.

Then you stumble across roles that remind you the function means something different depending on where you stand. Stand in a factory in Massachusetts, and marketing means translating industrial software into frontline trust. Stand in a Colorado hangar, and it’s turning rocket science into commercial confidence. Stand in a PlayStation boardroom, and marketing means figuring out where a 30-year-old gaming icon belongs in a culture that's re-making itself - and dad isn’t invited.

These three jobs share a brutal and beautiful through-line: marketing, at its most serious, is commercial diplomacy. It's translating one language into another: engineer to buyer, global brand to local culture, corporate ambition to human trust… without losing meaning in the process.

Before we get into this week’s opportunities, let’s take a quick look at where the marketing job market stands.

As of this week, there are 37,694 marketing jobs live across the United States, up 11.9% year over year. Senior-level hiring is growing even faster: 5,180 roles are at Director level or above, an increase of 19.9% from last year.

Salary transparency is also becoming more common, with 57.6% of postings now including compensation details. Across all marketing roles, the median salary stands at $91,998, rising to $157,498 for Director-level positions and above.

Overall, the numbers point to a healthy marketing job market, with particularly strong growth at the senior end.

Median Salary by Seniority

Median Salary in Top Hiring Cities

If you’ve never heard of Tulip, congratulations on not spending enough of your life thinking about Manufacturing Execution Systems. That’s what makes the marketing task more interesting.

Tulip makes software for the people who make things. Factory operators, engineers and frontline workers use it to build apps, connect machines, collect production data and generally replace some of the industrial technology that appears to have been installed shortly after electricity.

The company emerged from the MIT Media Lab, where Natan Linder and Rony Kubat started visiting factories and noticed something slightly ridiculous. Manufacturers were running astonishingly expensive and sophisticated machinery while the humans operating it were still using paper, stopwatches and waterfall software projects that could take years and millions of dollars to implement.

In 2014 they funded Tulip themselves, recruited MIT students and built their first prototype with New Balance.  Linder had already co-founded Formlabs, the Boston 3D-printing company that subsequently became a unicorn. Apparently one unicorn was insufficient.

Boston is a unicorn-building place. The region minted 5 new unicorns during 2025; Tulip arrived in January, and another two Boston startups crossed $1 billion in February.

Tulip joined the club in January, raising $120 million in a Series-D led by Mitsubishi Electric at a $1.3 billion valuation. The company says it now has 300+ employees, with its technology running across 1,000 customer sites in 45 countries for companies including AstraZeneca, Richemont and Stanley Black & Decker.  And now Tulip needs a new marketing boss.

Slight wrinkle: Tulip itself has not entirely decided what to call you.o]

The vacancy is advertised as Global Head of Marketing / Chief Marketing Officer, with the final title determined during the interview process depending on candidate experience, which is a novel take on hiring, but I guess it creates optionality. Base salary is $250K-$305K plus equity. You need to be in Somerville at least 3 days a week.

This is succession. Madilynn Castillo joined Tulip as its first marketer nearly 8 years ago and left this week, having ultimately become CMO. In her goodbye, she described building both the marketing team and the category during that journey.

As is the trend for CMO jobs - Tulip wants the new leader to own essentially everything: brand, narrative, demand generation, product marketing, communications, PR, events, pipeline and category leadership, while sitting with the CEO and board on growth strategy. They want somebody who can market complicated industrial software to both the person standing beside the machine and the exec deciding whether to spend millions buying it.

Then we arrive at the bit that made me choose this job.

Tulip wants its new CMO to reengineer the marketing organization around AI: how the team works, what it produces, how quickly it produces it and how demand gets generated. Marketing is apparently expected to “set the standard for AI adoption across Tulip.” The CMO also owns how the company gets found and selected as buyers increasingly use AI-mediated search and agents.  Of course, this can also mean becoming the company’s unpaid internal AI-transformation laboratory accountable for changing everyone else’s habits while retaining every conventional marketing KPI.

Plenty of companies are currently adding “AI” to job descriptions with roughly the intellectual commitment level of putting truffle oil on chips. This one at least feels more committed.

The person taking this job is being asked to redesign a marketing department while simultaneously running it. And Tulip still expects the vulgar old-fashioned stuff like pipeline and revenue to keep happening while you conduct this grand experiment.

I actually like that tension. If we’re all going to spend the next 5 years hearing CEOs explain that marketing organizations can become enormously more productive with AI, here is a reasonably well-funded CEO offering someone $305K plus equity to prove it.

If Taligence had the brief, I’d start at Samsara and PTC. Samsara gives you category building, connected physical operations, enterprise growth and marketers accustomed to making deeply unsexy infrastructure sound important. PTC gives you manufacturing credibility and extraordinarily relevant experience around industrial software, IoT and frontline transformation. For the mildly antisocial option, I’d raid Formlabs. Hard-tech, manufacturing, Boston, category creation, technically sophisticated products. The only drawback is explaining to Natan Linder why you have just recruited someone from the other unicorn he co-founded.

And if I wanted to know the real job, I’d go directly to Natan Linder. He is Tulip’s co-founder and CEO and is listed publicly as the hiring contact for this role. No need for 20 minutes of LinkedIn archaeology.

The incoming CMO inherits a company that already has customers, funding, a category, an established marketing organization and a departing CMO who spent 8 years building the thing.

Then comes the slightly terrifying bit.

You now have to rebuild the marketing machine around AI while proving to everybody else that the machine still makes money.

$305K plus equity. Dance, human. Dance.

If, like most people, your understanding of the space industry ends when the rocket leaves the launchpad and everyone at mission control starts clapping, Agile Space Industries would like to complicate your morning.

Getting something into space is only the opening problem. Once your extremely expensive metal thingy gets there, it still has to do the Ballet: change orbit, dock with things, dodge other things and occasionally land on the Moon without arriving like a grand piano dropped from a NYC crane.

Agile makes some of the little rocket engines that do that. Its specialty is in-space chemical propulsion: thrusters and engines that it designs, manufactures, 3D prints and hot-fire tests largely under one roof. The company says it has conducted more than 8,000 hot-fire tests.

The origin story is excellent.

In 2009, propulsion engineer Daudi Barnes founded a business called Advanced Mobile Propulsion Test. The original idea: Barnes would drive a specially equipped hot-fire testing facility out to remote customer sites so people could test rocket thrusters where they were.

Basically roadside assistance, except the customer has a rocket engine and everybody should stand much further back. NASA handed the fledgling business an SBIR contract the following year. By 2019 the testing operation had started moving upstream from testing other people's propulsion into designing and manufacturing its own. In 2021 it bought additive-manufacturing company Tronix3D, giving it more of the 3D-printing capability now central to how it makes engines.

And the company is now growing rather quickly. The job posting says Agile has grown more than 40% year on year for each of the past 3 years, with expansion underway beyond Durango into Tulsa and Seattle. In its latest financing announcement, Agile said revenues had more than tripled over three years, bookings had increased more than six-fold, and it had already booked enough work to nearly double 2025 revenue. It raised an oversubscribed $17M Series A backed by investors including Lockheed Martin Ventures.

I bet that they had to squint hard to avoid placing “join us, it’s a rocket ship” in this help-wanted copy.  

The title undersells this slightly.

You report to Chief Commercial Officer William Francis and are expected to build and lead the marketing organization, owning brand, product marketing, digital, PR, technical publications, social, events, GTM and chunks of commercial strategy.

Then the JD gets much more warrior-like.  Agile wants marketing involved in capture campaigns to win specific opportunities, product campaigns to take market share, market-development campaigns in areas including lunar, missile defense and international expansion, plus the 15-plus conferences it attends every year.

In other words, you won’t be somebody sitting in Colorado wondering whether the corporate typeface adequately communicates sufficient thrust. Marketing is being inserted directly into the machinery that wins contracts.

And these are no ordinary customers. Agile specifically likes candidates who understand NASA, Space Force, the NRO, SDA, MDA, commercial space companies and the giant aerospace primes. Quite the niche talent pool.

Win this job, and you’ll be translating enormously complicated engineering into enough commercial confidence that somebody puts your hardware on a mission where failure is more expensive than a failed Salesforce implementation.

You will have to take whatever the engineers are excited about - combustion stability, propellant chemistry, additive manufacturing, thrust ratios, presumably things involving Greek letters - and explain why a customer should bet an actual spacecraft on it. They explicitly ask for you to translate technical capability into compelling customer value props.

If Taligence had the brief, I'd start hunting from Ursa Major and Redwire. Ursa Major is almost indecently adjacent and in Colorado. Redwire brings deep space-and-defense credibility, and there is some pleasing family history: Agile CEO Chris Pearson previously ran Roccor before it was acquired by Redwire, while CCO William Francis co-founded Roccor and later worked at Redwire too.

For the more contrarian pick, I'd look at Hadrian. It makes advanced manufacturing for the defense industrial base rather than propulsion, but the commercial muscles are very similar.

Agile does, however, helpfully state that it is “not partnering with external recruiters or agencies” and asks recruiters not to contact staff directly. They still will.

So please regard the preceding paragraph as purely educational vandalism.

For an actual candidate, the hiring-manager route is obvious. The job reports directly to William Francis, Chief Commercial Officer, whose background spans engineering, business development and commercial leadership in space hardware. On TA, Robert Bruce has just joined Agile as Talent Acquisition Lead, explicitly saying he is partnering with leadership on workforce planning and scaling the company.

The job pays $188K-$220K, requires around 35% travel, and Agile strongly prefers someone based in Durango. “Remote” means Denver or Seattle, incidentally, rather than operating your lunar capture strategy from a hammock in Bali.

And in an unusually sweet little flourish, Agile says offers are typically made around the midpoint rather than the top of the published range.  So I guess even the salary has undergone controlled descent.

This is ultimately a job for somebody who can turn rocket science into commercial confidence. Customers can be persuaded. Procurement can be navigated. Competitors can be positioned against.

Then somebody bolts your product to a spacecraft and lights it. Physics gets the final edit.

Get this role (probably the coolest we found among 2,322 senior marketing jobs we reviewed this week) and you will be expected to figure out where PlayStation belongs across music, fashion, sports and entertainment, study emerging youth behavior, identify creators and collaborators, and then somehow manufacture “authentic” cultural relevance at global scale.

The problem is that gaming culture has become much wider, puzzling and harder to own.

A younger generation hangs out inside ecosystems like Roblox and Fortnite, where the game is simultaneously the entertainment, social network, creator platform, concert venue, fashion mall, and place your parents vaguely worry about. Roblox says that, as of August, 73% of daily active users who had completed an age check were under 18. The company makes the argument that Gen Z and Gen Alpha increasingly use the platform for identity, community and culture (not merely gameplay)

PlayStation’s competitor for the next generation’s affection is Roblox, Fortnite, TikTok, Discord and every other place where young people are already making culture happen without waiting for Sony to sponsor it.

That makes the wording in this JD interesting. PlayStation wants a 15+ year marketer capable of defining the “long-term cultural vision” of the brand, working with creators, talent and influencers globally, and embedding that thinking across Brand, Social, Partnerships, Events and Creative.

There is even a requirement to develop a “clear framework for the brand’s authentic expression within culture.”

Which may be the most corporate sentence ever written about being cool. The squishy human stuff doesn’t live in an MBB deck. Less “make PlayStation cool” and more identifying the cultural spaces where it has permission to show up.

If Taligence had the brief, I’d start with Epic Games and Riot Games. Epic has turned Fortnite into an absurdly effective collision of gaming, creators, music, fashion, sport and entertainment IP. Riot understands how to make a game become a culture rather than merely advertise one. For the alternative talent raid, I’d go outside gaming and steal someone from Nike or Coca-Cola. PlayStation already has more gaming credibility than any incoming marketer can manufacture. What it could use, though, is somebody who understands how a global brand enters youth culture repeatedly without looking like Dad has downloaded TikTok.

The JD says this person supports the SVP of Marketing. My strong read is Mary Yee, who returned to Sony Interactive Entertainment late last year specifically to lead the global marketing organization after previously helping lead PlayStation through the PS4 era and PS5 launch, followed by a stint as CEO of skincare brand Tatcha. She described her return as an opportunity to shape PlayStation’s “next chapter”

The role can be remote and pays up to $318K base, plus bonus, for someone who can understand Gen Z and whatever comes after Gen Z before the rest of Sony does.

Thirty years ago, PlayStation found youth culture in dark rooms full of rave music before the adults had worked out what to call it. Now the adults have created a $318K role to find it again and asked the successful candidate to document the process in a framework.

How do you do, fellow kids?