Pune (in-office)
Search has changed more in the last two years than in the ten before that. People now ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity what to buy, and the answer cites a handful of brands. We're looking for an SEO lead with 5+ years of experience who finds that exciting, to be Zerply's in-house SEO expert across every client we work with.
Zerply is an AI-native AEO growth firm. We get our clients into AI answers and into the search results that feed them. We sell the result, not a tool.
We do it on our own platform. Zerply tracks how AI models mention and cite a brand every day, plans content from real Search Console data, and publishes pages straight to the client's own domain. Agents handle the repetitive work, so our people spend their time on strategy and judgment.
We come from the team behind WittyPen, which has been doing content and search for 500+ companies since 2015. We're a small, high-ownership team. We'd rather ship steady, good work at a sustainable pace than perform busyness. If you do good work and want to push yourself further because you care about it, that's on you. We won't ask you to prove it with hours.
You'll set the SEO and AEO strategy for every client account. You'll be the person clients trust on anything search-related. You'll also lead a small team of AEO analysts who run the accounts day to day.
You'll have a platform built for exactly this work, and full freedom to build your own workflows on top of it with Claude Code, agents and whatever else makes you faster. This is the seat for someone who wants to move really fast and have the tools to do it.
Own the strategy across all clients. Technical, on-page, off-page and AI visibility, run as one connected system, not four separate checklists.
Be the client's go-to person for SEO. Run the strategy calls, present results and set honest expectations. When the numbers dip, have the hard conversation early.
Win visibility in search and in AI answers. Answer-first content, entity clarity, schema, and the signals that get a brand mentioned and cited.
Drive off-page and authority. Backlinks, digital PR and brand mentions in the places AI engines actually read. You run it, not just plan it.
Turn Zerply's signals into action. Read mentions, citations, share of voice and AI bot traffic every day, and turn them into each account's next moves.
Lead and coach the analyst team. Set the playbooks, review the work, and help each analyst get sharper every week.
Build AI workflows that make the whole team faster. Use Claude Code, agents and scripts to automate audits, briefs, reporting, and anything else that slows us down.
Shape the product. Feed what you learn back to the team building Zerply, so the platform gets better with every account.
5+ years in SEO, with hands-on depth across technical, on-page and off-page.
A current, practical understanding of how search works today, including how AI engines find, rank and cite content.
Real link-building and off-page experience: campaigns you ran yourself and can talk us through.
Some experience with AI-visibility or prompt-tracking tools, and a point of view on what actually moves citations.
You're very hands-on with AI. You use tools like Claude Code, Claude or ChatGPT every day, and you've built at least one workflow that saved real time.
Confidence with clients. You've owned accounts and you're comfortable being the expert in the room.
Experience guiding or mentoring others, whether or not you had the title.
Comfort with the usual stack: Search Console, GA4, Ahrefs or Semrush, and Screaming Frog or Sitebulb.
Agency or consulting experience running several clients at once.
Digital PR or publisher relationships you can bring with you.
Some comfort with code: Python, scripts or APIs.
You'll be early to AEO. Very few people anywhere have run it across many clients at once. Your playbooks become the standard.
Agents do the grunt work. Your time goes into strategy, judgment and client wins, not spreadsheets.
Real leverage. Here, seniority doesn't mean managing more people. It means running more accounts with better systems.
A team to lead, and the founders next to you. You'll work directly with the founders, shape the product you use every day, and grow the team as Zerply grows.
₹10–15 LPA, based on experience.
Fill in the short form below. It takes about 10 minutes.
A conversation with the founders about how you think about search today.
A final in-person round at our office in Pune.