Substack is building a new economic engine for culture, giving the brightest, most interesting, and most creative people on the internet the power of their own publishing platform. Substack empowers independent writers, artists, videographers, podcasters, and creators of all types to create, share, and make a living off their work through subscriptions, while offering them creative freedom, ownership, and a direct connection to their audiences.

The Brand Partnerships team at Substack is building our sponsorships business from the ground up. The Sales Manager will help lead that revenue engine. Brands want to reach the audiences that trust Substack publishers, and your job is to turn that demand into a repeatable sales motion, from the first agency meeting through signed insertion orders and renewals. This is a founding role on a small team, so the playbook is yours to write.

Responsibilities:

• Build sponsorships revenue number, and the pipeline, forecast, and pacing behind it

• Sell directly to senior brand and agency decision-makers, leading the largest and most strategic deals from prospecting through close

• Contribute to building the sales infrastructure a new business needs: territory and account coverage, pricing and packaging discipline, CRM hygiene, and a deal process that holds up as volume grows

• Translate Substack's story into a pitch that lands with CMOs and media planners, working with creative strategy to shape proposals that feel native to the platform

• Work closely with publishers and their teams to make sure sold campaigns are ones they actually want to run

• Bring market signal back into the company, shaping product, pricing, and positioning based on what you hear in rooms with buyers

• Represent Substack at industry events and in key agency relationships, opening doors for the whole team

About You:

• 10+ years in media or advertising sales, with meaningful time selling premium, direct-sold sponsorships at a publisher, platform, or media company

• A track record of closing seven-figure deals with brands and holding company agencies, and relationships you can activate from day one

• Comfort operating without a playbook: you've sold something new to market before, or built a sales function inside an early-stage business

• Fluency in how brands buy creator and content-led media, including measurement expectations, agency dynamics, and where budgets are moving

• Strong instincts for pricing and packaging, and the discipline to protect them under pressure to close

• Exceptional communication skills; you can pitch a CMO, coach a team member, and help build products that land in market

• Genuine belief in independent publishing and what Substack is building; bonus if you're a Substack reader or writer yourself

Substack’s compensation package includes a market-competitive salary, equity for all full-time roles, and exceptional benefits. Our cash compensation salary range for this role is $180,000 - $250,000. Multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, determine final offer amounts and may vary from the amounts listed above.

Substack is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or transgender status), age, national origin, veteran or disability status. We’re seeking people passionate about enabling independent expression and building a better business model for creators. If you want to see what media, communities, and content can become when unmoored from advertising models, and you have the skills and experience to contribute, we’d love to meet you.

Please see our Privacy Notice for details regarding Substack's collection and use of personal information relating to the application and recruitment process by clicking here.

Substack is building a new economic engine for culture, giving the brightest, most interesting, and most creative people on the internet the power of their own publishing platform. Substack empowers independent writers, artists, videographers, podcasters, and creators of all types to create, share, and make a living off their work through subscriptions, while offering them creative freedom, ownership, and a direct connection to their audiences.

About the Role

We're looking for an IT Systems Administrator to own our internal IT operations end to end. This is a hands-on individual contributor role for someone who thrives in a fast-moving environment, takes pride in running a tight, well-organized IT function, and knows how to build systems that scale. You'll be the go-to person for everything from onboarding new hires to managing our SaaS tool stack and supporting our path to SOC 2 compliance.

What You'll Own

Identity & Access Management

• Administer Okta across our full tool stack — managing SSO, SCIM provisioning, and app integrations

• Onboard and offboard users across both Okta and non-Okta applications

• Add and deactivate tools in Okta as our stack evolves

• Manage and track access for vendors and contractors, ensuring appropriate permissions are granted and revoked promptly

IT Onboarding & Endpoint Management

• Own the new hire IT onboarding experience — from laptop setup to tool access on day one

• Manage device enrollment, configuration, and compliance through Iru

• Maintain hardware inventory and manage device lifecycle

SaaS & Vendor Management

• Serve as the point of contact for IT tool vendors

• Identify integration requirements for new tools and manage their setup and deprecation

• Maintain documentation on our tool stack, access policies, and vendor relationships

SOC 2 Readiness

• Partner with our Systems Team to support SOC 2 compliance efforts

• Help implement and manage our future compliance platform, such as Vanta.

• Ensure IT processes around access, onboarding, and offboarding meet audit requirements

What We're Looking For

• 3–5 years of experience in a corporate IT or systems administration role, ideally at a tech company

• Hands-on Okta experience — you've set up SSO integrations and managed provisioning, not just administered existing configs

• Experience with an Apple-focused MDM — Iru/Kandji, Jamf, or similar

• Familiarity with SOC 2 requirements and ideally experience working in or toward a SOC 2 environment

• Experience with compliance platforms like Vanta or Drata is a plus

• Strong communicator who can work cross-functionally with operations, engineering, and external vendors

• Organized and process-oriented — you document what you build and build for repeatability

Substack’s compensation package includes a market-competitive salary, equity for all full-time roles, and exceptional benefits. Our cash compensation salary range for this role is $120,000-$160,000. Multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, determine final offer amounts and may vary from the amounts listed above.

Substack is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or transgender status), age, national origin, veteran or disability status. We’re seeking people passionate about enabling independent expression and building a better business model for creators. If you want to see what media, communities, and content can become when unmoored from advertising models, and you have the skills and experience to contribute, we’d love to meet you.

Please see our Privacy Notice for details regarding Substack's collection and use of personal information relating to the application and recruitment process by clicking here.

Substack is building a new economic engine for culture, giving the most interesting people on the internet the power of their own publishing platform. The terms of our culture shouldn't be set by legacy media gatekeepers or chaos-fueling social platforms, but by the people who actively shape it.

This role exists to make Substack the obvious home for those people.

The Role

This is not a creator partnerships role, or influencer marketing, or a PR function.

The work is to craft Substack’s product-led story making the most ambitious voices in culture want to create here. When a great writer /creator/podcaster is deciding where to go to build their independence, we want Substack to feel like the only real answer.

Your north star will be to drive high-quality creator inbound that converts into paid subscriptions and app users. You will craft and bring to life our creator marketing narrative (through product marketing, programs, and creator campaigns), and build the machine that drives cultural authority for Substack.

This is a 0-to-1 role which means the team and infrastructure you'll need doesn't fully exist yet. You'll build it.

What you'll own

The platform story at every altitude. You'll develop and steward the product-led narrative that explains what Substack is and why it matters for creators right now. The narrative work is not only external, it includes internal thought leadership that will keep creator-facing work coherent across product, comms,, and partnerships.

The proof-point machine. You'll identify the creator stories that prove what's possible on Substack, and build the operation that gets those stories into the places where creators actually pay attention (press, social, industry moments, word of mouth). You'll know how to make a creator win feel like a signal, not a press release.

Cultural authority. You'll partner with our Head of Partnerships and Head of Brand/Editorial to build campaigns, programs, story angles, partnerships, and content that make Substack a persistent presence in the conversations where creators make decisions. What those look like is yours to determine but it needs to earn Substack a seat at the table across priority categories.

Creator inbound and conversion. You'll own how the platform story reaches the right people and work across partnerships, comms, and product to close the loop from narrative to pipeline to lifecycle to evangelism. What we're saying, to whom, through which channels, and how we know it's working.

The team. You'll build and lead a small, high-craft function that leverages AI to deliver on narrative and a distinctive brand identity at scale.

Who we're looking for

You connect story to business by default. You don't see creativity and growth as separate modes. You care about how a narrative translates to inbound and how a creator win drives signal in the market. You’ve also worked closely enough with product teams to know how a feature becomes a proof point and how to get in front of technical teams early enough to shape/substantiate story rather than react to it.

You've operated at a senior level inside an agency, media company, or platform. You've run programs, led teams, and owned business outcomes. You know how to develop and lead from a point of view, and influence excellence in the people around you.

You've been a writer, journalist, or have spent time working directly with creators. You understand how creative people make decisions, what earns their trust, and what makes a platform story inspire someone to act.

You have legible evidence of taste. Either your own (in what you've written, built, or championed), or in your track record of developing people who have it.

Stretch: You've published something yourself. You understand firsthand how stories travel, what makes audiences grow, and what it feels like to build something people show up for consistently.

Why this role, why now

Substack has global scale, ambitious creators, and a sharp point of view about what the internet needs to look like (especially in the AI era). This point of view is still getting threaded through our platform and go to market. Building, substantiating and capitalizing on Substack’s role in culture – at a time when so many people are looking for quality, depth, originality – is the opportunity in front of us. This person will play a central role.

Substack’s compensation package includes a market-competitive salary, equity for all full-time roles, and exceptional benefits. Our cash compensation salary range for this role is $250,000-310,000. Multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, determine final offer amounts and may vary from the amounts listed above.

Substack is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or transgender status), age, national origin, veteran or disability status. We’re seeking people passionate about enabling independent expression and building a better business model for creators. If you want to see what media, communities, and content can become when unmoored from advertising models, and you have the skills and experience to contribute, we’d love to meet you.

Please see our Privacy Notice for details regarding Substack's collection and use of personal information relating to the application and recruitment process by clicking here.