Brand & Social Media Lead

The role

You'll be our first social media and brand hire, and you'll own how Ralo looks, sounds, and feels across socials. You will help people build trust with Ralo long before they're ever in-market. A mortgage is the biggest, most trust-dependent purchase most people make; your job is to make Ralo the name they believe in and recommend to the people they love.

You'll set the voice, write the post, brief the film, cut the clip, own the calendar and hit publish. You'll work directly with the founders, a designer, a videographer, our PR partners, and UGC creators, directing the work and producing plenty of it yourself.

By default you'll work scrappy and fast, reserving polish for the few things that truly need it, and leaning on LLMs and generative tools to produce at volume. 

If you came up at an early-stage startup and like building a brand from a blank page, you'll feel at home. If you need a content team, a strategist above you, and an agency doing the making, this will be a hard role.

What you’ll own

Brand voice and identity. Define and protect how Ralo sounds and looks across every touchpoint. You will work closely with the founder to define Ralo’s brand.

Social. Own the company account end to end: short-form video for Instagram, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok; punchy posts on X; product announcements; and educational guides that make a confusing topic feel simple. You're responsible for content creation end to end: ideation, scripting, shooting, editing, and publishing, you produce most of it yourself, at volume. You'll also ghostwrite for and help operate the founders' personal accounts, using their voices and reach to amplify the brand.

Newsletter. Build and run a newsletter that keeps Ralo top of mind for both new and existing borrowers - the steady drumbeat that carries people through a long, infrequent decision.

And as the brand grows, you'll also own: 

• Blog and educational content, including expert interviews, where it earns its place.
• Video, directing our videographer on launch films and bigger productions.
• PR and storytelling, partnering with our PR team on announcements and narrative.
• UGC, sourcing and directing creators.

What the role is (and isn’t)

• In scope: brand voice and identity, social (your core), newsletter and lifecycle (your core), plus blog, video, PR partnership, and UGC as the brand scales.
• Shared: scrappy assets are yours to make; our designer polishes the graphics that need it and our videographer shoots the productions that need it. You direct both. PR runs through our agency, with you as the storyteller; the founders are the voice on their own accounts, with you assisting.
• Not your job: paid acquisition and the ad account (that's our Paid Marketing Manager), the product and pricing, the sales conversation and the mortgage process itself, and building data infrastructure.

What you'll need

• 4+ years in brand or content marketing, ideally for a consumer product, with a portfolio that proves you can build a voice from a blank page.
• A track record of growing an audience (a brand account or your own) that you can show. It's the clearest proof of this skill, so bring the receipts.
• You're obsessed with what makes content perform: hooks, pacing, retention, and why people keep watching.
• Genuinely excellent writing across formats: a thread, a long-form post, an email, a video script and the taste to make Ralo sound like no one else.
• You make your own scrappy video and image assets (LLMs and generative tools encouraged), and you know exactly when something deserves the designer's or videographer's polish instead.
• Comfort steering by signals you can't cleanly attribute, branded search, direct and organic traffic, social growth, sentiment, word-of-mouth. Brand pays off on a lag, and you build conviction anyway.
• The judgment to prioritize: go deep on the few channels that matter now, rather than spreading thin across all of them.
• An early-stage operator's instinct: you run the calendar, coordinate the freelancers, and ship; rather than waiting on a team that doesn't exist yet.
• High agency, and the urgency to just publish and learn.

Nice to have

• Background in fintech or finance: or a proven knack for making dry, high-stakes topics genuinely engaging.
• Hands-on video, editing, or design ability beyond scrappy production.
• Existing relationships with press, creators, or UGC talent.
• Experience as the first or earliest brand hire somewhere.
• Genuinely bought into Ralo's mission to make mortgages affordable.

This is an in-person role at our New York City office.

What we offer

• Meaningful early-employee equity in a company taking on a multi-trillion-dollar market.
• A top-tier team to build with, including people from Y Combinator, Google, and Goldman Sachs
• A low-bureaucracy environment: minimal meetings, maximum ownership.
• A high bar focused on execution, learning, and continuous improvement.