Overview
At Lupa, we're hiring a Founding Earned Media Lead to own earned media across a portfolio of consumer and B2B brands — powered by an AI-native PR system.
Here's the twist: the volume work is already handled. An agentic system does the gap analysis, prospect scoring, first-draft pitching, reply classification, and reporting. What it can't do is exercise judgment — and that's you.
You'll decide whether a pitch actually lands, whether an editor's "let me check with my team" is real interest or a polite no, and which relationships are worth building. This is not an admin role. It's editors, angles, and judgment — with a machine clearing the busywork out of your way.
It's an early-career bet on a rare story: very few people will have actually run an agent-powered earned-media operation in 2026. You'd be among the first. In two years, you won't be doing this job — you'll be running the thing that does it.
What You'll Do
Own the relationships with publishers, editors, journalists, and podcast bookers. You decide which twenty of two hundred prospects get a human touch instead of a sequence.
Be the editorial gate. Every pitch passes through you. Is it factually true? Does it sound like this brand? Would an editor at this specific outlet care?
Run reply triage. The system handles the obvious cases. Anything ambiguous — any negotiation, any objection — comes to you. This is where placements are won or lost.
Commission the link magnets. Shape proprietary data studies, pick the angle, and decide which outlets get exclusives. The highest-value, hardest-to-automate work.
Steer strategy quarterly. Review gap analysis, approve tactic mix, read the weekly scorecard, and make the call on reallocation. The system proposes; you decide.
Optimize for mentions, not just links. Branded mentions are ~3x more predictive of AI Overview visibility than raw backlinks. You understand the scoreboard changed.
What you won't do: build prospect lists by hand, hunt for editor emails, submit directory listings, chase unlinked mentions (you get a staged queue), draft cold outreach from a blank page, manage sending infrastructure, or babysit spreadsheets. An analyst handles the research and list building.
Who You Are
Must-haves:
Real earned editorial placements — coverage a human editor chose to run. Not marketplace links, not sponsored posts. You can walk us through 2+ placements and the pitches that landed them.
Daily AI user — you already use AI in real work and can name a specific case where you caught the model being wrong.
Strong editorial judgment in English — you're the voice gate for multiple brands in front of US editors. You immediately spot the sentence that makes an editor stop reading.
Directness — when a campaign isn't working, we hear it in week two, not at the quarterly review.
Nice-to-haves:
Existing relationships with journalists or publishers in health, wellness, consumer goods, or B2B SaaS
Experience with Qwoted, Featured, HARO, or similar platforms
Email deliverability knowledge (SPF, DKIM, warmup)
Hands-on experience with Claude Cowork or any agentic workflow you built for yourself
Both B2B and DTC experience
You don't need to be technical. You'll work through Claude Cowork (approval interface + email platform) — no terminal, no code. Prior Cowork experience is a strong signal but not required.
You're probably a fit if you're excited an AI drafted the first pitch, you've earned real placements and built genuine editor relationships, you can hold multiple brand voices without blurring them, and you're comfortable being the final approval before something goes out under a brand's name.
You're probably not a fit if your value prop is volume of outreach sent, you want a process handed to you, you need approval before every decision, or reviewing machine-generated work feels like editing rather than authorship.
What's In It For You
Own the whole function. Not a slice of an account — earned media here is you. You report directly to the founder, with no layers in between.
No client-service treadmill. No timesheets, no pitch cycles, no defending timelines. One employer, one portfolio, one number that's yours.
Your expertise compounds. Every judgment call feeds back into the system and makes it better. Your work builds equity, not just output.
Fully remote, anywhere. Full-time, with a minimum of 5 hours of daily overlap with US business hours.
Compensation: Competitive salary commensurate with experience
Application
Ready to own earned media at an AI-native house of brands? Here's how we hire — four stages, about two weeks end to end. We'd rather pay you for real work than run you through five interviews.
Stage 1 — Three placements: Send three earned editorial placements you landed, plus the pitch that landed each. That's your application.
Stage 2 — Paid work sample (60 min): Mark up a real AI-drafted outreach sequence with planted problems, tell us what you'd send instead, and show us touch 2. Use AI while you do it — we want to see how you work.
Stage 3 — Hiring manager call (45 min): Five minutes to prep, then pitch a story angle unrehearsed; walk through a placement that took 4+ touches; a judgment scenario; and your questions.
Stage 4 — Culture Index survey + reference call.