Director of Marketing

Job Description

About Faculty

Faculty transforms organisational performance through safe, impactful and human-led AI.

We are Europe’s leading applied AI company, and saw its potential a decade ago - long before the current hype cycle.

We were founded in 2014 with our Fellowship programme, training academics to become commercial data scientists.

Today, we provide over 300 global customers with industry-leading software, and bespoke AI consultancy for retail, healthcare, energy, and governmental organisations, as well as our award winning Fellowship.

Our expertise and safety credentials are such that OpenAI asked us to be their first technical partner, helping customers deploy cutting-edge generative AI safely.

Our high-impact work has saved lives through forecasting NHS demand during covid, produced green energy by routing boats towards the wind, slashed marketing spend by predicting customer spending habits, and kept children safe online.

AI is an epoch-defining technology. We want people to join us who can help our customers reap its enormous benefits safely.

About the role

We have three core business areas: our SAAS product called Frontier, our Fellowship programme which has trained over 500 PhDs/Postdocs to become professional data scientists, and our ‘Applied AI’ consultancy which is the largest business area. This is a new position within Applied AI, created to keep pace with Faculty’s growth, and an exciting opportunity to play a key role in scaling a significant UK tech company.

As part of the leadership team, you will lead and execute on how we present Faculty’s Applied AI business to our existing and target markets. You will also lead on Faculty’s overall public identity, which incorporates company-wide branding.

We will look to you to set strategic direction across the whole spectrum of marketing and communications, and to lead a team in the day-to-day execution of positioning Faculty appropriately in the market and vis-a-vis our competitors.

We operate at the premium end of the market - we are differentiated from our competitors by our creativity and our commitment to deep expertise and quality. We sell complex, high value services to senior people. This means our marketing focus is not on building a high-velocity high-volume demand generation machine for undifferentiated widgets, rather it is about ensuring that the thought leadership and case studies we create, the events that we host, and our website and other public channels are consistently excellent. It is about making sure that campaigns we run are beautiful, creative and thought provoking.

The right individual will understand and strive for this, and will guide a team to understand the nuances of our work and communicate these to our customers.

What you'll be doing

The role will report to the Managing Director of the Applied AI business, and involve:

• Leading Faculty’s Marketing and Communications team, currently 6 people but set to grow in line with Faculty’s growth, and owning the relevant marketing and communications budgets

• Setting Faculty’s Applied AI marketing and communications strategy, including how we describe our core service offerings and how we articulate ourselves and our impact to the market

• Day-to-day responsibility for implementation of that strategy, both personally and through your team - across core collateral, thought leadership, events, campaigns, and our website

• Defining the KPIs for marketing so we can measurably track whether the strategy is working

• Leading the implementation of a brand refresh currently nearing finalisation by a leading external branding agency - ensuring consistent roll out across Faculty both internally and externally

• Being a champion for the importance of brand consistency and high-quality design across Faculty, including using the brand refresh as a vehicle for positive change

• Overseeing management of Faculty’s core public-facing channels, including social media and website, and overseeing PR & press engagement (although this is run with a high degree of autonomy by Faculty’s PR & Comms Lead)

Faculty is well suited to self-starters, and beyond these core responsibilities, as a growing firm, we will actively encourage the successful candidate to find wider opportunities to pursue their interests and add additional value, and will create space in the role to enable this. For example, this could include:

• Opportunities to represent Faculty in external speaking engagements at panel events, conferences or with media

• Opportunities to get directly involved in client-facing delivery, e.g. playing an expert advisory role on projects where you may have domain expertise

Who we are looking for

At Faculty, your attitude and behaviour are just as important as your skills and experience. We look for individuals who can support our values, foster our culture, and are passionate about what they do.

We like people who combine expertise and ambition with optimism -- who are interested in changing the world for the better -- and have the drive and focus to make it happen. If you’re a good cultural fit for Faculty, you probably:

• Love finding new ways to solve old problems - when it comes to your work and professional development, you don’t believe in ‘good enough’. You always seek new ways to solve old challenges.

• Think scientifically, even if you’re not a scientist - you test assumptions, seek evidence and are always looking for opportunities to improve the way we do things.

• Are pragmatic and outcome-focused - you know how to balance the big picture with the little details and know a great idea is useless if it can’t be executed in the real world.

For the Director of Marketing role specifically, we are open minded about the particular career background and are more interested in your skills and experience. We are looking for someone with:

• Team leadership. You care passionately about people and building an environment where people can thrive. You know when to be close to something and when to give space.

• Writing skills. You write excellently and know what good writing looks like - you can write about complex subjects compelling to a C-suite audience.

• Design and brand skills. You have a strong understanding of how to build successful brands and what that should mean in the context of somewhere like Faculty; and you have a keen eye for high-quality design and know how to achieve it consistently.

• Influencing and persuading skills. You can inspire others about the importance of marketing, brand, design and communications and bring people with you - including leadership and other key stakeholders, your team, your peers, and wider delivery teams.

• Understanding of AI and related technology. You do not need to be a technologist but you are someone who is interested in AI and can quickly pick up the nuance behind it, and hence will be able to credibly articulate what Faculty does and why both internally and externally.

• Execution and Delivery. You are grippy and action-oriented, and take pride in executing consistently and leading teams who do so. You’re able to execute across multiple priorities in a complex stakeholder landscape. You do not let uncertainty and lack of process be a blocker, and can drive actions and decisions at all levels and are willing to get into the details to drive outcomes. You have a problem-focused, solutions-oriented approach to how you work.

• Consultancy experience. You have some familiarity of the nuances of successful marketing for technical consultancy - either having worked for a consultancy (e.g. a branding agency or similar) or with direct experience of seeing how successful consultancies engage the market.

We encourage you to apply if you think that you meet most, but not all, of the requirements.

What we can offer you:

The Faculty team is diverse and distinctive, and we all come from different personal, professional and organisational backgrounds. We all have one thing in common: we are driven by a deep intellectual curiosity that powers us forward each day.

Faculty is the professional challenge of a lifetime. You’ll be surrounded by an impressive group of brilliant minds working to achieve our collective goals. Our consultants, product developers, business development specialists, operations professionals and more all bring something unique to Faculty, and you’ll learn something new from everyone you meet. You’ll also have the opportunity to make your mark on a high-growth start-up now poised to expand internationally.