The posting
About this role:
- Type: Full-time
- Location: Remote (we're Europe based but work with global clients)
- Reports to: Co-founder
- Compensation: $60K - $90K USD (or EUR/GBP equivalent) base salary, DOE.
- Role title: SEO & AEO Team Lead
- Seniority: Team lead (player-coach)
About Discovered Labs
Discovered Labs is an SEO/AEO agency built by a Stanford rocket scientist turned AI researcher (Ben Moore) and demand gen marketer with experience scaling B2B SaaS companies to 8-figures in ARR (Liam Dunne).
We're a team of ML engineers, data scientists and senior marketers trusted by fast-growing B2B SaaS companies including Instantly, Granola and Composio to help generate leads and customers through Google and AI assistants like ChatGPT.
We do this through a mixture of content marketing, technical optimisations and off-site brand amplification (PR, backlinks, Reddit marketing).
View recent case studies at discoveredlabs.com/case-studies
High-level overview of our approach:
- AI-powered operations: Our ML team builds internal tools that remove repetitive work and give marketers more time for judgement and execution.
- Senior judgement: Experienced marketers set the strategy and quality bar; automation supports the work rather than replacing it.
- Full-stack execution: We work across content, technical SEO/AEO and off-site amplification to give clients better outcomes.
Note: If you want to stand out, please include a Loom video showing a tool, system or deliverable you've produced and are proud of. We'd love to see it!
This role
As our SEO & AEO Team Lead (AEO is answer engine optimisation, also called GEO or broadly AI search), you'll lead 2-3 of our delivery pods while running a small number of client accounts yourself to stay sharp and close to the work. Success means every client your pods look after is healthy, any account at risk has a recovery plan underway, team members always have approved work ready, and the standard of our client work keeps rising as we grow.
Each delivery pod consists of an SEO account strategist and SEO analyst who own the bulk of strategy and day-to-day work, collaborating alongside our editorial team who are responsible for content operations. The strategists and analysts of your designated pods will report to you.
If you already lead a small SEO team at an agency while holding your own clients, this job will feel familiar. What may be new is how we operate as a company: we’re deeply AI-native which means the most successful people here are systems thinkers, strong with data and willing to do work the new way.
If you've coached and reviewed other people's work without a manager title, we'd like to hear from you too. We'll teach you our in-house tools, our AI agents and how we approach AI search.
It is fully remote, ideally within +/-4 hours of GMT, though we can be flexible for the right person.
What you'll do
- Run your own client accounts. Be the account strategist on them: run communications, fortnightly check-ins, sign off the 90-day plan an analyst builds and present the monthly report that ties the work to the client's pipeline and revenue.
- Keep every team's delivery planned and moving. Attend weekly pod meetings and make sure every client has its next 30 days of work planned, reviewed and with owners assigned.
- Review work before it reaches clients. Make sure every plan, report, brief and root-cause analysis is reviewed and signed off before a client sees it. You will help build the framework that allows you to do this without being a bottleneck.
- Catch at-risk accounts early. Act on an account's warning signs the week they appear, before the client raises a problem, and make sure the analyst runs a root-cause analysis on any account at risk. Take escalations on your teams' accounts yourself: join the call, set expectations and agree a recovery plan with the strategist.
- Sharpen your team's account strategy. Work through 90-day plans, KPIs and strategy decisions with each strategist, and help analysts find the real reason an account's results moved. Coach your team so they can make most of these decisions.
- Manage and develop your team. Run fortnightly 1:1s and quarterly reviews with the strategists and analysts who report to you. Run regular team training built from real deliverables, call reviews and mock client calls.
- Hire and onboard. Interview candidates for your teams and successfully onboard new strategists and analysts before they work on client accounts on their own.
- Roll out and improve our delivery standards. Work with each workflow's owner on its documentation and logic, from 90-day plans to monthly reports, make sure every delivery pod follows them to the Definition of Done, and bring the owner a change when your reviews show a gap.
- Run our AI agents and help improve them. Use them on your own accounts, and work with our engineers to improve them or build new ones. Building tools yourself is a bonus.
How you'll spend your time
A rough split. It flexes month to month with what your pods and clients need.
- 40%: Your pods' client work: syncs, reviews, strategy and escalations
- 25%: Your team: 1:1s, training, hiring and onboarding
- 20%: Your own accounts
- 15%: Improving how we deliver: standards, templates and our AI agents
The ideal person for this role
- You give feedback that changes the next deliverable. When a deliverable misses the mark, you show what good looks like clearly enough that the person can act without asking again, then check their next piece to see the change held.
- You’re detail-oriented. You read deliverables, trace each claim and number to its source and catch what reads well but is wrong.
- You can tell when a plan is wrong. You see whether a 90-day plan targets the right opportunities and whether a root-cause analysis found the real cause, and you can explain why.
- You notice what's slipping before anyone asks. You spot a client about to run out of approved work, or an account whose results are dropping, and make sure it gets sorted.
- You lead with the client's business. You can explain what an SEO or AEO recommendation means for a client's pipeline, and you can tell when rankings are up but an account is still at risk.
- You create systems, not heroics. When ways of working must change, you run it through a structured process, notify the relevant people, update our documentation and coach people to the new standard. You actively delete chaos and push back on complexity.
- You own problems through to resolution. You carry the bag, operate with urgency and ensure a satisfactory resolution. You don’t expect others to solve your problems.
Requirements
- A track record of SEO strategy you owned, including plans and root-cause analyses you built from GSC, GA4, Ahrefs or equivalent data and can walk us through.
- Evidence that you've reviewed and coached other people's work, such as deliverables you checked before they reached a client and people who improved as a result. Managing direct reports is preferred, though not required if you can show this.
- Client escalations you've handled yourself, such as an at-risk account you stepped in on, what you agreed with the client and what happened to the account afterwards.
- Experience keeping several client accounts on track at the same time, with a clear way of deciding what gets your attention each week.
- A process, checklist, template or training you created that other people adopted.
- Excellent written and verbal English and availability for a working day that overlaps meaningfully with CET.
This role is not for you if…
- You want to step back from client work once you manage people. You'll keep your own accounts and stay hands-on every week.
- You manage client relationships and leave the SEO decisions to specialists. You'll judge plans, root-cause analyses and deliverables yourself, and strategists will bring you their hardest problems.
- You'd rather fix a weak deliverable yourself than coach the person who wrote it. Each week you'll review your teams' work and return it with notes they can act on to avoid you being a bottleneck.
Culture fit
You'll thrive here if:
- You like small teams, direct feedback and a high degree of autonomy.
- You’re comfortable challenging others’ thinking and also having yourself challenged.
- You are comfortable making a recommendation and explaining the data and rationale behind it.
You won't thrive here if:
- You need heavy management or wait for perfect instructions.
- You rely on “that’s how it’s always been done” to defend an approach.
- You leave concerns unspoken because the conversation might be uncomfortable.
- You intend to view Discovered Labs as another client amongst other projects and clients.
What's in it for you
- Compensation: $60K - $90K USD (or EUR/GBP equivalent) base salary, DOE.
- Fully remote: work from where you do your best work, with meaningful overlap with GMT.
- Progression: A path towards Head of SEO & AEO as you grow your people and the results your teams deliver for clients.
- Flexibility: You can have flexible working hours with the expectation of 40 hours of meaningful work per week.
- Paid leave
- Real autonomy: you will have a voice, be trusted to do your work and make improvements to our systems.
- A small, senior team: work directly with experienced operators, with direct feedback and quick decisions.
- Annual company off-site: We get together once a year at a nice destination to relax, reset and plan.
Interview Process:
- Async assessment (15 minutes)
- 30 minute call with founder
- 90 minute deep-dive into career history and work
- 3 hour paid assessment
- Reference checks with former peers and managers.
To apply:
Please complete the short form on the platform where you see this job ad. Be specific as possible when answering questions - we love detail.
Please do not use sloppy AI to auto-apply for this role. It’s obvious and will result in us not progressing with your application for this role and future roles.
