AEO Practice Lead / Incubation

Experience level: not applicable.

You'd be joining a leading agency as a consultant, embedded on a new engagement with a well-known enterprise brand that's building an Answer Engine Optimization capability from the ground up. Standing this up has been identified as a strategic priority for their business, so this isn't a short strategy engagement that ends with a recommendation deck. The agency's role is to build the capability, run it, and eventually hand it to the client's own team. Some of the people who build it are expected to go with it.

As Practice Lead, you'll sit inside the agency's incubation team and own day-to-day delivery for the client while building the operating model, methodology, and team structure the practice will run on long after incubation ends. This is a hands-on builder role: part practitioner, part program architect.

You've led an AEO or GEO program before and you've learned from it. You're comfortable defining process where none exists, and you can hold both the client relationship and the internal team accountable to quality and timelines at the same time. You'll partner closely with your client-side counterparts to build trust and a working rhythm, and coordinate across the agency's contributors and senior leadership to keep priorities aligned as the practice takes shape.

The category is young, so some of this you'll figure out as you go. That's expected.

Responsibilities

• Own daily delivery leadership for the client's AEO program, setting priorities, unblocking the team, and making sure work ships on time and to standard.

• Stay hands-on in the work itself, not just above it. You'll be in the tools alongside the team.

• Serve as the primary day-to-day point of contact with client-side counterparts, building trust and a reliable operating cadence.

• Define and document the practice's methodology, frameworks, and playbooks so the capability can scale beyond incubation and transfer cleanly to the client.

• Establish prioritization and intake processes that balance real-time client requests against longer-term practice-building work.

• Coordinate across agency partners (strategy, content, SEO, analytics, and leadership) to keep the work aligned with the client's broader marketing and business goals.

• Identify gaps in current tooling, reporting, and measurement for AEO performance, and recommend or build solutions.

• Turn early learnings into repeatable processes, training materials, and staffing recommendations for scaling the team.

• Communicate progress, risks, and recommendations to agency leadership and client stakeholders.

• Direct experience leading an AEO or GEO program, start to finish. This is the non-negotiable one.

• Hands-on practitioner knowledge of how AI answer engines source and surface content: structured data, schema markup, content structuring for LLM retrieval, citation tracking and measurement.

• Solid SEO fundamentals underneath it.

• Delivery and program leadership experience in a fast-moving marketing, agency, or consulting environment.

• Strong client-facing communication and relationship management.

• Comfort with ambiguity and building process from scratch.

Background we'd expect

Most people who fit this have come from an agency or platform delivering AEO or GEO as a service. Think Scrunch, Bluefish, Athena, or similar. We're also open to people who've built this capability inside a smaller business or for themselves. What matters is that you've actually done the work, not the size of the logo you did it for.

We Are Rosie provides strategic consulting and talent solutions for the marketing industry. We partner with more than 200 of the world’s biggest brands and agencies to help them solve unique marketing challenges with the best people, swiftly and at scale. Founded by former advertising executive Stephanie Nadi Olson in 2018, We Are Rosie is on a mission to redefine how marketing works, with an inclusive, human-centric approach that’s better for business and better for marketers. Our company has been recognized as an industry trailblazer and earned many accolades, including being named to the 2023 Global Top 100 Inspiring Workplaces, the Inc. 5000 2022, and Adweek’s Fastest Growing Agencies in 2021.

We Are Rosie is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, age, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical​​​ condition, pregnancy, genetic information, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or ​expression, veteran status, marital status, or any other status protected under federal, state, or local law.

A leading global agency and consultancy, building a new Answer Engine Optimization capability for a well-known enterprise brand. This is a consulting engagement with the agency, embedded with the client team, and there's potential to transition to a full-time role on the client side.

Length: 28 weeks

Hourly Rate: $150 (flexible based on experience)

Location: Remote

Hours: 40 hours/week