Director of AI Search and SEO

Fully Remote USA, EST timezone Hi, we're Search Atlas! We're a rapidly growing SEO software company and full-service digital agency. Fortune 500 companies and Silicon Valley startups trust us to drive their search performance — and we run our entire company, from engineering to HR, on agentic workflows built on Claude Code. This role is different from the typical "Director of SEO" posting, so read carefully before applying. What this role actually is You will own the AI Search product vertical at Search Atlas and run it all the way through — strategy, methodology, and the enterprise-grade product behind it. We have an AI search product today. It's okay. Your job is to make it the best in the category and to out-execute competitors who currently win enterprise deals on narrative and posture rather than substance. This is a builder-operator role, not an account-manager role. You'll work alongside our AI Search services team and report directly into leadership, with real ownership of how Search Atlas wins in AI search. Three things have to be true about you. Most candidates have one, some have two. We need all three: Deep AI search and SEO domain expertise. You understand how LLMs retrieve, rank, and cite — Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini. You've run real experiments, not read newsletters. If you're a brilliant engineer who'd "ramp up on SEO," this isn't your role (but talk to us anyway — see the bottom of this posting). Agentic engineering ability, at enterprise grade. Not "I use Claude Code daily." You design autonomous systems: fleets of agents, not chat loops; work that ships through CI/CD with auto-graded merge requests, staging environments, and controlled releases — not scripts you babysit on your laptop. Local CLI loops are table stakes. We consider agentic marketing a sub-discipline of agentic engineering, and we'll evaluate you that way. Product judgment. In agentic work, throughput is cheap. What matters is the quality of your judgment: how clearly you define the problem, how you design evals and guardrails, and how you grade systems you didn't watch being built. What you'll do Own the AI search vertical Define and evolve our methodology for AI visibility: entity SEO, knowledge graph optimization, structured data, semantic search, citation likelihood. Build the research engine: continuous data collection, hypothesis testing, and scoring systems that turn "why does ChatGPT recommend them and not us?" into measurable, repeatable answers with stated confidence levels. Drive the AI search product roadmap with our engineering and product teams — you bring the domain truth, the frameworks, and working prototypes. Build autonomous systems, not deliverables Design agent fleets that complete SEO work end-to-end: research, audits, content, internal linking, competitive intel, reporting — from data pull to deployed change. Move work into pipelines: changes open merge requests, MRs are graded automatically, failures block, humans review in staging, releases roll out safely (including canary). If you've never put marketing automation through CI/CD, expect to learn fast here. Maintain the shared library of agents, skills, MCP integrations, and slash commands the whole team runs on — and retire anything that requires a human to babysit it. Operate at our scale: a publisher network of 56,000+ sites, 375M+ connected pages we can deploy fixes to in real time, ~200,000 managed Google Business Profiles, and $1.8B+ of ad spend under management. Your systems need to be safe at that scale: rollbacks, audit trails, eval gates. Lead clients and the team Join enterprise client calls with Customer Success; explain to C-suite executives what agentic AI actually changes about search — in plain language. Manage and mentor a team of 3–5+ SEOs, and raise their ceiling: train them to design and supervise agents, not paste prompts. Publish internal and external thought leadership; get new approaches into client work in days, not quarters. Required experience Expert-level technical SEO: crawling, indexation, Core Web Vitals, structured data, log file analysis — proven at enterprise scale (six-figure-page sites and up). A track record in AI search specifically: measurable AI Overview / LLM citation outcomes you can walk through and defend. Claude Code at depth: subagents, MCP servers, hooks, slash commands, custom skills, headless mode, and the Agent SDK — in production, not in demos. Real autonomous systems you've shipped: multi-step, tool-using agents that completed work end-to-end without supervision. You should be able to show one that ran for days. Software engineering fundamentals: Git workflows, CI/CD, testing and eval design. You can ship Python or JavaScript with agentic tooling and review what your agents wrote. Analytics depth: GSC API, GA4, BigQuery; reporting that builds and sends itself. Experience managing SEO teams of 3–5+, and presence in front of executive stakeholders.

Benefits

*subject to location Fully covered health, vision, and dental insurance Unlimited PTO Paid parental leave Personal development budget Lasik eye surgery benefit Pet health insurance 401k plan Salary USD 150,000 - 210,000 per year Our Recruitment Process Step 1: Initial screening call with our recruitment team Step 2: Assessment to showcase your skills (if applicable) Step 3: Interview with our Hiring Manager Step 4: Final interview with our CTO Step 5: Offer extended Life at Search Atlas Group We care about work-life balance, innovation, and a collaborative culture, no matter where you work. We host monthly virtual game days and events, and our team has the flexibility to contribute to charity initiatives they care about. Remote work doesn't mean disconnected work, and we make sure of it. Our core values: Collaborative & Engaged: We're a tight-knit team that supports each other and shares knowledge. Excellence Driven: We aim for the highest standards and keep raising the bar. Self-Starter Mentality: We take initiative and solve problems on our own. Innovative: We embrace change, experiment, and think outside the box. Student Mentality: We learn from our mistakes and keep evolving. Why Join Us? We're proud of the recognition we've earned along the way: Nevada's Top Workplaces — #1 Small Business, Best New Ideas Best Start-Up Agency (U.S. Search Awards) Top B2B Companies (Clutch) Inc's On The Rise and Best Places to Work (Inc. Magazine) Great Place to Work Certified (Great Place to Work) Apply To This Job