Head of Marketing - Oakland, CA

Who we are:

Formic is on a mission to reshape American manufacturing by making automation accessible to every factory. As labor constraints rise, costs increase, and global competition intensifies, automation is no longer optional for manufacturers that want to stay competitive.

We deliver automation through a Robotics-as-a-Service model that combines industrial robotics, proprietary software, and full-service support into a single, integrated solution. By removing the traditional barriers of cost, complexity, and risk, we enable manufacturers to deploy automation quickly and realize measurable gains in throughput, safety, and operational efficiency without large upfront capital investment.

Backed by leading investors including Lux Capital, Initialized Capital, Blackhorn Ventures, and Mitsubishi HC Capital North America, Formic is scaling rapidly and building the foundation for a new era of high-performance, Made in America production.

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 l