Brand Lead

Description

About The Position

Upwind is a next-generation Cloud Security Platform that leverages runtime context to identify and prioritize critical risks, providing precise insights and efficient cloud security management. Unlike traditional tools, Upwind uses runtime data proactively for risk prioritization and posture insights,ensuring teams focus on what truly matters. With industry-leading efficiency and eBPF-powered sensors, Upwind delivers comprehensive capabilities — including agentless cloud posture discovery, real-time threat protection, and integrated API security. We're in a period of significant growth. There's an enormous amount to build, improve, and shape — and every hire changes the trajectory of the company.

We're looking for a Brand Lead to own how Upwind looks, sounds, and feels everywhere it shows up: identity and visual language, narrative and voice, campaigns, website experience, events, and the creative that carries all of it. Cloud security is a crowded, noisy category. Your job is to make Upwind the brand security engineers and CISOs recognize, remember, and trust.

This is a hands-on, high-ownership role. You won't write a brand deck and hand it off — you'll set the direction, brief and steer designers, writers, agencies and production partners, and ship the work. You'll report to the Head of Growth and work day-to-day with Growth Marketing, Content, Product Marketing, Design, Events, and Sales. It's an individual contributor role today with a clear path to building a team as the function scales.

We work AI-natively. We expect you to reach for AI tools by default — to research, build, analyze, and ship at a pace that would have needed a team of five two years ago

What You'll Do

• Own the brand end to end. Steward and evolve Upwind's identity — visual language, voice, messaging expression, and the guidelines and systems that keep it consistent across every surface and every team.
• Turn positioning into a story people repeat. Partner with Product Marketing to translate what we do into a narrative that lands with security engineers, DevOps, and CISOs - and make sure it shows up the same way in a booth, a homepage, an ad, and a sales deck.
• Build and run brand campaigns. Concept, produce, and launch integrated.
• Direct the creative. Lead creative direction across design, video, motion, and photography. Write the brief, choose the partners, hold the bar, and give the feedback that gets the work to great.
• Own the brand experience of the website. Work with Growth and Design so upwind.io looks like the category leader and converts - brand and performance pulling in the same direction, not against each other.
• Own the organic social channels. Run Upwind's organic presence — primarily LinkedIn, plus Instagram and Facebook. Own the content calendar, the voice, the creative, and the community: what we post, how often, how it looks, and how we show up in the comments.
• Manage agencies and vendors. Creative and brand agencies, production houses, freelancers, merch and fabrication partners — hold them to clear briefs, timelines, and KPIs, and make each one earn its budget.
• Build the AI-native brand stack. Use AI across research, concepting, creative production, and localization to compress cycle times and scale output without scaling headcount.
• Measure brand like a grown-up. Track share of voice, branded search, awareness and perception, community and social signal - and bring a clear point of view on where the next dollar of brand spend should go.
• Work like a seller. Sit close to Sales, listen to real calls, and build brand that helps close deals - not brand that wins awards.
  
  

• 5+ years in brand building at B2B SaaS companies - cloud infrastructure or cybersecurity is a strong advantage. You've owned a brand, not just executed inside one.
• BA/BSc in Communication Studies, Marketing, or a similar field — with excellence.
• Strong creative judgment and taste. You can tell good work from work that only looks good, articulate why, and raise the level of everyone you brief.
• Excellent writer. You can write a headline, a manifesto, and a booth wall — and make all three sound like the same company.
• Full professional proficiency in English, written and verbal — a must.
• Comfortable with a technical audience. You can get smart on cloud security fast and earn credibility with engineers who can smell marketing from a mile away.
• Commercially minded. You think in pipeline and category position, connect brand work to business outcomes, and can defend a brand investment with numbers.
• AI-native by default. You already use AI tools throughout your workflow and are relentless about finding new ways to work faster.
• A self-starter who ships. High motivation, fast learner, comfortable with ambiguity, and biased toward getting things done in a fast-moving startup.