Please note that this role is in the San Francisco Bay area and requires 5 days per week in office.How You'll ContributeWe're building the platform where the world's research lives -- 64 million full-text papers, used by 30% of the world's faculty. Search has always been the front door. That's changing. In the near future, most people won't type a query into Google, they'll ask an AI agent, which will retrieve and cite sources on their behalf. We want Academia's papers to be the ones it finds.
We're looking for a General Manager of SEO / GEO to own this function end-to-end. You'll have full ownership of strategy, execution, and results across both traditional search and AI-driven discovery. You'll report directly to the CEO and work with a small team of engineers. The job is to make 64 million papers findable by humans today, and by AI agents tomorrow.
As GM of SEO / GEO, you'll operate like a founder with a specific problem to solve: figure out where the leverage is, run the experiments, build the systems, and own the numbers. No one will hand you a playbook. You'll write it.
- Own SEO and GEO end-to-end: You will own organic search traffic and AI-citation traffic, from keyword architecture and crawl health through to citation optimization for large language models. Every layer of this function falls within your purview.
- Deliver consistent, measurable results: Each initiative you lead will be defined by a clear baseline, a stated goal, and a documented outcome. Reporting is precise and quantitative.
- Drive rigorous experimentation: You will design and execute tests that resolve meaningful questions with speed and discipline, deploying AI tooling and technical ingenuity to identify competitive advantages.
- Lead and develop a focused team: You will direct a team of 3-4 engineers and design support, setting strategic direction, removing obstacles, authoring PRDs, and elevating team performance through clarity, urgency, and high standards.
About You- You bring 5+ years of hands-on SEO experience, ideally gained within highly competitive industries
- You possess a deep, technical understanding of SEO architecture, how data moves through crawling, indexing, and ranking systems, and you have a demonstrated ability to identify where leverage lies within that architecture.
- You have a working command of GEO architecture: how a large language model translates a user prompt into search queries, evaluates and selects SERP results, determines which sources to cite, and how this behavior differs across model families.
- You are a driver, not a passenger. You advance projects with urgency and ownership -- directing the team, authoring specifications, structuring experiments, and holding the bar without waiting to be asked.
- You are a relentless learner. You have proactively integrated AI tools into your practice because the alternative was not acceptable to you. You hold well-reasoned, empirically grounded views on what works.
- You communicate with precision: quantitative and qualitative reasoning together, always. You distinguish between a meaningful metric and a vanity statistic.
- You operate as a player-coach. You are as comfortable conducting a technical SEO audit as you are leading a strategic planning session, and you do not draw a rigid line between analysis and leadership.
Benefits
Comprehensive Healthcare Coverage: 100% employer-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents
Generous Time Off: 21 paid vacation days, 12 paid company holidays, and unlimited sick days; paid parental leave and other leaves for life's needs; 6-week paid sabbatical every 4 years
Flexible Work Arrangements: Flexible daily schedules within an onsite work environment, annual remote-office budget, and monthly WFH internet stipend
Competitive Compensation: Competitive salary, 401k plan, and stock options
Mission-Driven Company: Join a mission-driven company to accelerate and democratize the world's research
