About this role
About InstaLILY
InstaLILY is an AI products and infrastructure company that puts execution at the frontier of enterprise AI. That work begins with Lily™ , the world's first AI Forward Deployed Engineer, which learns how a business works, builds the software it needs, and goes live in days. It does not leave when the work ships; it stays and keeps the software working as the business changes. Lily runs wherever the work happens, in the cloud, on-premise, or at the edge, through InstaLILY's Small Data Center, built with NVIDIA technology. Founded in 2023 by Amit Shah and Sumantro Das, InstaLILY has raised nearly $100 million from Energize Capital, Insight Partners, and Home Depot Ventures. Headquartered in New York, with offices in San Francisco, London, and Toronto, InstaLILY serves leading companies across construction, industrial distribution, logistics, healthcare, and other operationally intensive industries. Learn more at https://instalily.ai/ .
The Traction
Revenue grew 5x over the past year, and Lily has driven over $200M in new annual sales for a single customer. We serve some of the largest operators in our industries, including SRS Distribution (part of The Home Depot family), United Rentals, and Henry Schein, and we work closely with the Google DeepMind and NVIDIA ecosystems.
How We Work
We work in small teams with real ownership: clear problems, direct access to the customers whose work you're changing, and room to ship. Your code runs in live production systems inside billion-dollar operations, so you see your impact directly. People who do well here want that proximity to the work. We're growing fast, and the people who join now shape what this company becomes. Everything runs on three principles: Customers, Culture, and Code.
The Role
You'll own how InstaLILY explains what it sells.
Lily is a new category of product sold to people who are not shopping for AI. A VP of Operations at a distributor with 400 branches does not wake up wanting an agent. She wants quotes out faster and fewer parts lookups landing on the wrong SKU. The story that closes that deal is not the story that lands at an NVIDIA keynote, and right now both get improvised on the way into the room.
Your first job is the narrative. What category Lily belongs to, what it displaces, and why an operator should believe an AI Forward Deployed Engineer is different from the four other things in their inbox this week. Get that right and the competitive position, the enablement, and the launches all follow from it. Get it wrong and none of them help.
Read this part carefully: it is a solo role. Head of Product Marketing here means head of the function, not head of a team. We are not planning to hire under you, and there is no agency on retainer. You will write the first draft of everything and most of the second. If what you want next is to manage people, this is the wrong job.
We are open on background. How you think and how you write matters more to us than whether your last title said product marketing. Strategists, journalists, analysts, consultants, and founders have all done this job well.
You'll work directly with the founders, sales leadership, and the forward deployed engineers who put Lily into production.
What You'll Do
Own the narrative. Define what Lily is, who it's for, and what it displaces. Write the positioning and hold the line on it across the website, the deck, and every seller's mouth.
Build the vertical versions. Construction, industrial distribution, logistics, and healthcare each have their own pain, economics, and proof. One story does not survive all four.
Own competitive. Know who we lose to and why, across systems integrators, internal AI teams, incumbents, and other startups. Build battlecards sellers actually open, and keep them current as the market moves quarterly.
Shape how the category sees us. Analyst briefings, and how we show up alongside NVIDIA, Google, and Microsoft. You'll be in those rooms yourself.
Sales enablement. Own the pitch deck, the one-pagers, the demo narrative, and the objection handling. Sit in on live calls and fix what isn't landing.
Turn deployments into proof. Case studies and reference stories with real numbers, cleared by the customer and by legal.
Launches. Run go-to-market for new capabilities: naming, positioning, enablement, launch content, and the measurement that says whether it worked.
Pricing and packaging input. Bring the market view to how Lily is packaged and what we charge for it.
What You'll Need
8+ years of work that maps to this. Product marketing, strategy, research, journalism, consulting, analyst work, or founding something. We care what you built, not what it was called.
Writing that does the work. Clean, specific, no filler, no adjective standing in for a number. This job is mostly writing, and competent is not enough.
A point of view you can defend. We will disagree with you on purpose in the interview. We want to see whether the position holds up.
Work samples. Send two or three pieces of past work with your application: positioning work, a strategy memo, a competitive teardown, or writing that changed how people talked about something. Tell us which parts were yours.
Enterprise deal literacy. You understand how six- and seven-figure deals with multiple stakeholders, procurement, and security review actually get decided.
Technical curiosity. You can talk to an engineer about how the product works and come away with something a buyer would care about. You don't need to write code.
Appetite for unglamorous industries. Distribution, construction, logistics, healthcare operations. These are not SaaS buyers, and learning how they actually run is most of the job.
Self-sufficiency. No team, no agency, nobody to hand the deck to.
AI-native. You use frontier AI tools seriously in your own work and push past surface-level usage. This matters more here than at most places.
In-person availability. 5 days/week in our New York office.
What We're Not Screening For
A product marketing title on your last three jobs. A specific SaaS category. An MBA. Years of experience used as a proxy for judgment. Knowing our verticals on day one.
What we are screening for is whether you can take something complicated, understand it faster than we expect, and explain it to a skeptical operator in a way that makes them lean forward.
What You'll Get
Real traction. The product works, customers are live, and we've already driven over $200M in incremental revenue for customers. This isn't a bet on an unproven thesis.
A blank page. First product marketing hire. The narrative is yours to write, and it's the one the whole company will use.
Direct access. You'll work with the founders and sales leadership daily, not through three layers.
Deep partnerships. Backed by Energize Capital, Insight Partners, and Home Depot Ventures, with ecosystem partnerships across Google, NVIDIA, and Microsoft.
Stage. Early enough that the category story is still being written, late enough that customers are already paying for it.
Compensation and Benefits
- Salary Range: $165,000 - $195,000, commensurate with experience
- Equity: Generous stock options awards and refreshers for top performers.
- Benefits: Medical, Dental, Vision, 401K, Well-being stipend, In-office lunch reimbursement, PTO and 10 US Federal Holidays, and more!
Quality Over Quantity
To ensure a focused, high-quality hiring experience, we kindly ask candidates to limit their applications to 3 open requisitions at any given time . Applying strategically to roles that best align with your skills and career goals gives you the highest chance of standing out. Have you interviewed with us in the past 12 months? We encourage you to reach out directly to your previous interviewer rather than submitting a new application.
InstaLILY is committed to providing an inclusive and barrier-free recruitment process. If you require an accommodation, please let us know, and we will work with you to meet your needs.