Head of Marketing - Oakland, CA

About the team:

Formic's Marketing Team is the growth engine behind our commercial expansion. We move fast, experiment boldly, and build systems that scale. We work in close lockstep with Sales, RevOps, and Leadership to generate pipeline, sharpen our message, and get in front of the right manufacturers at the right time. This team is small, high-impact, and driven - and we're looking for someone who can match that energy. 

About this role:

As our Head of Marketing, you will build, optimize, and lead a scalable engine for creating demand and qualified pipeline. You will own how Formic shows up in the market, how we identify and reach the manufacturers we can help, and how we turn that engagement into high quality opportunities for Sales.

This is a broad, hands-on role spanning Marketing, lead generation, Sales Development, and GTM Engineering and managing a team to deliver across those areas. You'll bring those capabilities together around a common goal: creating qualified pipeline and quantifying through data and insights what's driving it. As Formic grows, you'll help determine how the team and these capabilities evolve.

We're looking for someone who combines creativity with operating rigor. You'll set strategy, but you'll stay close enough to the work to understand what's actually happening. You'll establish clear priorities, ownership, and metrics, and make decisions based on results. When something works, you'll scale it. When it doesn't, you'll change it or stop doing it.

You'll also build and develop the team around you. That means setting clear expectations, delegating real ownership, coaching people to get better, and holding the team accountable for results. We want a leader who welcomes challenge, seeks out evidence that their assumptions may be wrong, and changes course when the data or the team tells them something different.

This is a builder role. One day you might be sharpening Formic's positioning; the next, reviewing pipeline performance with Sales, coaching an SDR, digging into why a campaign isn't converting, or working with a GTM Engineer to test a completely different way of reaching manufacturers. You should be equally comfortable asking "What should we try?" and "Did it work?"

We're not looking for someone to bring us a standard B2B marketing playbook or generate activity for activity's sake. We want someone who creates focus from ambiguity, turns experiments into learning, turns learning into repeatable systems, and can clearly connect the work of their organization to business results.

You will own the engine that feeds our sales and deployments.

In this role you will:

Own Brand & Marketing

• Own Formic's marketing strategy and how we show up in the market.

• Develop and continually sharpen our positioning, messaging, and story.

• Translate Formic's technology, business model, and customer value proposition into messaging that resonates with manufacturers and their economic buyers.

• Own content, creative, video, website, customer stories, events, campaigns, thought leadership, PR, product marketing, and other channels that build awareness and demand.

• Develop differentiated messaging across industries, use cases, personas, and stages of the buying journey.

• Turn customer outcomes, deployments, product capabilities, and what we're learning in the field into compelling content.

• Build Formic's brand within manufacturing while ensuring our marketing investments support clear commercial objectives.

Own Demand & Pipeline Generation

• Own the creation of qualified pipeline across Marketing, lead generation, SDR/outbound, ABM, events, paid, organic, partnerships, and emerging channels.

• Establish clear pipeline goals and build repeatable systems to identify, engage, and qualify manufacturers that fit Formic's ideal customer profile, optimizing channel mix, conversion, and resources.

• Lead and develop our Sales Development function, including targeting, prospecting strategy, messaging, sequencing, coaching, productivity, and performance.

• Establish clear funnel definitions, ownership, lead routing, and follow-up processes to ensure every source of inbound and outbound interest is captured, acted upon, and effectively handed off to Sales.

• Partner closely with Sales and RevOps on territory priorities, pipeline needs, lead quality, conversion, and feedback from the market.

• Measure pipeline contribution, progression, conversion, and cost by source and channel, connecting marketing investments to closed-won revenue and informing where to invest, optimize, or stop.

Build Our GTM Innovation Capability

• Lead our GTM Engineering capability, using AI, automation, data, enrichment, personalization, and emerging technologies to improve how we identify, reach, engage, and qualify potential customers.

• Own the effectiveness and evolution of our marketing technology ecosystem, including CRM integrations, outbound platforms, lead routing, data quality, attribution, and reporting, in partnership with Sales and RevOps.

• Build and optimize scalable systems for account identification, segmentation, prospecting, personalization, campaign execution, and lead management.

• Evaluate existing tools and workflows, identifying opportunities to simplify, automate, integrate, consolidate, or eliminate work rather than defaulting to additional tools or headcount.

• Drive disciplined experimentation across channels, technologies, data sources, and approaches, establishing clear hypotheses, measurable outcomes, and decisions about what to scale, change, or stop.

• Ensure our GTM infrastructure is reliable, documented, and maintainable, with clear ownership, appropriate data governance, and minimal dependency on any single person or external partner.

Own the Funnel and the Numbers

• Establish clear visibility into the entire funnel, from target account through qualified opportunity, pipeline progression, and revenue.

• Define and own a focused set of metrics that measure pipeline creation, conversion, velocity, cost, channel effectiveness, and commercial impact.

• Partner with Sales and RevOps to ensure reliable data, consistent reporting, and a shared understanding of performance.

• Establish a disciplined operating cadence that translates performance insights into decisions about strategy, priorities, budget, and resources, holding the organization accountable for outcomes rather than activity.

Create Focus and Accountability

• Translate broad company objectives into clear priorities, ownership, expectations, and measurable outcomes that connect the team's work to business goals.

• Make disciplined decisions about priorities and resources, challenging assumptions, stopping initiatives that aren't delivering results, and adapting as we learn.

• Stay close enough to the work to identify problems early, remove obstacles, and hold people accountable without becoming a bottleneck to execution.

• Foster a culture of transparency, constructive challenge, and open communication about performance, priorities, tradeoffs, and lessons learned.

• Establish accountability for external agencies, contractors, and technology partners, including deliverables, performance, costs, documentation, and continuity, while building sustainable processes that preserve institutional knowledge and support organizational change.

Build and Lead the Team

• Lead and align a multidisciplinary organization spanning Marketing, content and creative, lead generation, Sales Development, and GTM Engineering around shared commercial goals.

• Build a high-performing team by establishing clear expectations, delegating meaningful ownership, coaching and developing talent, and addressing performance gaps directly.

• Assess existing capabilities, recognize and develop the strengths of the people already here, and determine what additional skills and resources we'll need as we grow.

• Hire thoughtfully and build organizational capabilities that create leverage, rather than adding unnecessary layers or headcount.

• Foster a culture of creativity, curiosity, accountability, experimentation, and continuous improvement, where people feel empowered to challenge assumptions and solve problems.

What Makes You a Great Fit:

• Experience building and leading Marketing, Growth, Demand Generation, or similarly broad functions in high-growth B2B companies, with measurable commercial results.

• A track record of building, improving, and scaling marketing and pipeline-generation systems, not simply inheriting and managing established operations.

• Deep understanding of B2B demand generation, funnel economics, segmentation, conversion, attribution, and how Marketing, SDR, and Sales work together to create and convert pipeline.

• Experience developing differentiated positioning and messaging for complex products, markets, and buying decisions.

• Strong technical fluency and demonstrated experience evaluating, integrating, and optimizing marketing technology, data, automation, and AI-enabled GTM systems, with the ability to diagnose problems and make informed architectural decisions.

• An AI-native mindset, with demonstrated ability to apply emerging technologies, experiment rigorously, evaluate results, and turn successful approaches into scalable capabilities.

• Strong people leadership, including building and developing teams, delegating meaningful ownership, addressing performance gaps, and leading effectively through growth and organizational change.

• An operating style that combines creativity, analytical rigor, intellectual flexibility, and accountability, with the judgment to challenge assumptions, make difficult tradeoffs, and change course when evidence warrants it.

• The ability to operate strategically and tactically, creating clarity from ambiguity, communicating effectively across functions, and staying close enough to execution to understand and solve problems.

Bonus points if you have:

• Experience in manufacturing, industrial automation, robotics, industrial technology, or similarly complex B2B markets with long sales cycles and multiple decision-makers.

• Experience directly building or leading SDR organizations, including account-based and territory-based outbound strategies.

• Experience building or leading GTM Engineering, Growth Engineering, or similar technical growth capabilities.

What Success Looks Like

Within your first year, Formic has a marketing and pipeline-generation engine that we understand, measure, and know how to scale.

We know who we should target, how to reach them, which messages resonate, which channels create qualified opportunities, what those opportunities cost, and where we should invest next.

There is clear ownership across the funnel. Marketing, lead generation, Sales Development, and GTM Engineering operate as one connected organization, with a tight feedback loop into Sales. The team knows what matters and what it's accountable for.

Experiments have hypotheses and measurable outcomes. Successful ideas become repeatable systems. Unsuccessful ones produce learning and stop consuming resources. Decisions about priorities, budget, and headcount are grounded in results.

Our marketing and GTM infrastructure is reliable, integrated, and well understood. We have confidence in our data, clear accountability for lead management, and systems that the team can operate and improve independently. Technology and vendor decisions are deliberate, economically justified, and aligned with our commercial priorities.

Most importantly, Sales has a consistent and growing flow of qualified opportunities, and we can explain what is creating them.

That's the engine you'll own.