Lead end-to-end growth for a pre-launch consumer hardware startup: set strategy, build brand voice, grow a pre-launch audience, run creative-led paid and organic programs, manage contractors and a small team, use AI to accelerate content and research, and report on full-funnel KPIs to drive acquisition, activation, and retention.
About Overlay
Why This Role Is Different
What You’ll Do
What We’re Looking For
Bonus Points
Benefits
The Team
Culture & Values
Overlay is building the world’s first intelligent makeup robot—reimagining beauty application through robotics, perception, and design. As a venture-backed, pre-launch startup, we’re defining a new category of personal robotics at the intersection of self-expression and engineering. Our system operates directly on the human face, requiring an unprecedented level of precision, safety, and real-world robustness.
We’re a small, highly technical team working in person in Oakland—building something that does not yet exist, and making it real.
We're building a new category of home robotics and you’ll be our first go-to-market hire, making it one of the most important decisions we'll make this year. You'll own how the world discovers, falls for, and talks about our brand long before the hardware ships, and well after.
This is a senior role for someone who still loves to make the work themselves. You'll set the growth strategy and then go build it — writing the brief, shipping the campaign, standing up the event. Over time you'll grow a small team (likely starting with one junior hire) and orchestrate a roster of contractors across video production, UGC, content, and creative. But on day one, you are the team.
We are going after a discerning, premium, urban female customer who has high standards and sharp taste. Reaching her in a way that feels native, memorable, and a little magic is the whole game. If you've unlocked a customer like this before — through brand, through culture, through craft — we want to talk to you.
This means:
- You're not inheriting a playbook or a team, you’re building it from the ground up. The brand's voice, the launch, the first 10,000 fans are yours to shape.
- Brand and growth are the same job here. No silos, no handoffs. You own the creative point of view and the numbers it drives.
- This is a product people will want to film. A makeup robot is inherently demo-able and share-worthy. The hard part isn't getting attention — it's directing it with taste.
- Build the audience before the box ships. You get the rare chance to grow a community pre-launch, so we arrive to demand instead of a cold start.
- AI-native from day one. We expect you to build a creative and research engine with AI baked in — punching far above our headcount.
- Real ownership, real proximity. You'll work directly with the founder, make calls that stick, and see your bets reach the customer in days, not quarters.
- Own the growth strategy end to end. Define how we acquire, activate, and retain our primary and secondary customer profiles, then execute against it with urgency.
- Protect and sharpen a distinctive, premium point of view across every touchpoint.
- Build a fast, experimental content and creative operation spanning social, UGC, and original video — managing contractors and production partners.
- Blend online and offline. Pair a strong social presence with offline moments including demos, activations, and experiences that make our customer feel something and want to share it.
- Lead early qualitative and quantitative work to understand how our customer really feels about what we're building, so we can hone messaging tightly for launch.
- Build an audience before launch. Explore how makeup and skincare content, education, and community can grow a loyal, engaged userbase ahead of our hardware launch so we ship to demand, not silence.
- Grow a lean team over time and manage a flexible bench of contractors and creators, keeping quality high and the bar premium.
- Create a team culture of relentless execution, experimentation, and curiosity (everything from trying new ad creative to trying new technology)
- Be extremely data driven and be excellent at defining, setting, and reporting on full-funnel KPIs
- Run weekly performance reviews: diagnose misses, identify what's working, and ship corrective action plans fast
There are lots of paths that could lead you to be successful in a role like this; we think the strongest candidates will have some of this experience:
- 7+ years of experience in growth marketing, with at least 2+ years managing people
- Real consumer experience, ideally hardware. You've grown a consumer product and care about the physical-product journey.
- Proficiency in the full-stack of marketing tools: You know what tools to use and how to use them—or you can figure it out quickly. You’re excited to try new tools to unlock more capabilities.
- You've built or scaled a UGC or creator program for a consumer product.
- Comfortable in Meta Ads Manager and/or TikTok Ads Manager.
- You understand creative performance natively: hooks, retention curves, platform culture, format iteration for TikTok and IG.
- You’re self-directed and don't wait to be told what to test next.
- You are fast: you ship, learn, and iterate without overthinking it.
- Must be AI pilled and able to bring AI deep into the workflow for content production, creative iteration, customer research, personalization, and ops to move faster and smarter than teams many times our size.
- You've reached a premium, design-literate female customer before through brand, culture, or craft.
- A genuine interest in makeup, skincare, beauty products, and its related subcultures.
- You've taken a hardware or consumer-tech product through a pre-launch waitlist, pre-order, or crowdfunding moment and converted hype into demand.
- You've grown an owned audience (newsletter, social following, community) from zero to a real, engaged base.
- You've run offline as a growth channel: pop-ups, demos, dinners, or experiential activations that people filmed and shared.
- You have a personal AI stack you actually use — for creative iteration, research, copy, or ops — and opinions about what's overhyped.
- You can cut your own video or design your own assets well enough to ship a test without waiting on anyone.
- You've worked at or around a startup pre-product, and you're comfortable with ambiguity, fast pivots, and a blank page.
- Highly competitive salary & generous early-stage equity
- Best-in-class medical, dental & vision insurance
- 401(k) matching program
- Flexible Time Off with 10 paid holidays
- Commuter benefits
- Office in downtown Oakland near 19th Street BART station
- Small, fast-moving team with high ownership and low process
- Strong bias toward shipping, learning, and iterating quickly
- In-person collaboration in our Oakland office
- Move Fast, Move Smart: Act quickly, but with clear thinking and good judgment.
- Extreme Ownership: Own outcomes fully from idea to execution to results.
- Disagree Boldly, Then Commit Fully: Challenge ideas openly, then align and execute without hesitation.
- Intellectual Honesty Above All: Prioritize truth over ego. Be candid, admit mistakes, and follow the evidence.
- Live Demos: Show real, working results instead of talking about ideas.
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