Outbound Systems Architect

Title: Outbound Systems Architect Location: New York , San Francisco or Remote ABOUT AIROPS AirOps is the full-service platform for brand growth in the age of AI search. As consumers shift from traditional search engines to platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, the entire ruleset of growth is being rewritten. Buyers now rely on agents to discover, recommend, and purchase products and services for them. If your brand isn't part of the answer, you aren't in the running. Our platform offers everything a brand needs to get found, recommended, and earn trust. We work with category leaders, including teams at Ramp, Chime, Airbnb, ServiceNow, and Rippling, to drive visibility and accelerate growth from AI search. Backed by Greylock, Unusual Ventures, Wing VC, and Founder Collective, we're headquartered in San Francisco, New York, and Montevideo. ABOUT THE ROLE We are seeking an engine builder to own, optimize, and scale our high-volume outbound infrastructure. You will manage the technical plumbing and deliverability systems powering 500K+ monthly emails across dozens of active client accounts, ensuring every customer consistently hits their performance goals. This role sits at the intersection of outbound strategy, email infrastructure, deliverability, campaign performance, AI, experimentation, customer strategy, and product development. Over the next 6–12 months, you will transition our custom-built outbound stack into an automated engine. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Portfolio Performance & Optimization: You will own system-wide outbound performance and output guarantees across all active clients. By continuously tracking email volume, reply rates, bounce rates, domain health, deliverability, and downstream goals, you will build proactive diagnostics that fix deliverability drops before they hit customer results. - Architect High-Volume Infrastructure: You will design, maintain, and scale our custom backend domain, inbox, and sending architecture for 500K+ monthly emails. Your focus will be to guarantee peak deliverability while preparing our setup for 3x account growth. - Systematic Campaign Experimentation: You will build a systematic testing engine across subject lines, messaging variations, targeting, and sending schedules to maximize positive reply rates. - AI Engineering & Prompt Design: You will own and continuously refine the prompt systems and LLM workflows responsible for generating high-converting outbound copy and personalization at scale. - Product & Engineering Partnership: You will serve as the internal technical expert on cold email systems, helping bridge the gap between campaign operations and product development. - Playbooks & System Methodology: You will define cross-portfolio benchmarks and performance standards that enable internal account managers to clearly frame results and strategy for clients. By codifying outbound best practices into internal playbooks, you’ll ensure consistent execution and high-quality campaign delivery across every account. WHO YOU ARE - The High-Volume Specialist: You have managed complex, multi-account cold email environments at scale (100K+ emails/month), ideally within a fast-paced agency or high-growth managed service environment. - Data & Personalization Stack Expert: Proven experience working with modern data enrichment, programmatic personalization workflows, and bulk lead verification pipelines. - A Pure Systems Thinker: You look at outbound as a deterministic machine-inputs, deliverability variables, data pipelines, and outputs, rather than just "writing copy." - Enterprise Security & Compliance Operations: Comfortable operating outbound infrastructure within strict enterprise brand guidelines, ensuring proper domain security, data handling, access controls, and auditable campaign workflows. - Obsessed with Infrastructure: You know the technical mechanics of inbox provisioning, domain rotation, deliverability maintenance, and contact discovery inside and out. - Metrics-Driven & Autonomous: You manage by the numbers. You catch deliverability drops or underperforming campaigns before anyone else notices. - Energized by Backend Systems: You prefer being under the hood building scalable engines rather than sitting in client-facing status calls. NICE TO HAVE - Prior experience managing high-volume publisher outreach, link acquisition, digital PR, or affiliate partner recruitment. - Experience identifying and prioritizing high-value publishers based on relevance, authority, citation potential, audience fit, and likelihood of placement. - Familiarity with AEO, LLM visibility, digital authority, and how third-party mentions and citations shape brand discovery in AI-generated answers. - Ability to translate operational pain points into clear product requirements and work effectively with product and engineering teams. OUR GUIDING PRINCIPLES 1. Extreme Ownership 2. Quality 3. Curiosity and Play 4. Make Our Customers Heroes 5. Respectful Candor BENEFITS - Equity in a fast-growing startup - Competitive benefits package tailored to your location - Flexible time off policy - Parental Leave - A fun-loving and (just a bit) nerdy team that loves to move fast!