Head of Publisher AI Operations

Cashmere · Remote · Reports to the Co-Founder / CXO · No direct reports · Owns publisher success, post-signature · Half strategy, half build

Where this is going

Stripe didn't make payments possible. Payments already worked. What Stripe did was make it possible for anyone to accept them in an afternoon, without a bank relationship, a merchant account, or a compliance department. Shopify didn't invent selling online. It meant you no longer had to build a store to have one.

Content licensing for AI is sitting exactly where payments sat before that shift. Every deal is bespoke. Every integration is a project. Terms get negotiated one at a time by lawyers, and the only participants who can afford the overhead are the largest houses in the world.

We intend to be the Stripe of AI content licensing — the Shopify of content for agents. Any publisher, any agent, standard terms, licensed content metered and paid for at the point of use. Not a deal you negotiate for nine months. Infrastructure you plug into.

That's the whole thesis. Everything below is what it takes to get there.

What we do today

We're the infrastructure layer between the people who make content and the AI systems that use it.

We ingest content in whatever form a publisher can send it. We parse it into something structured and machine-usable. We host it. We run entitlements — who is licensed for what, under which terms, for how long — plus the usage reporting and payment that follow.

We're a small team. We have publishers live and more signing every month.

What stands in the way

Not demand, and not willingness. Operational cost.

Doing this properly for even one publisher is real work. Content arrives in every format anyone has ever invented. Licensing terms differ deal by deal. Entitlements have to be exact. Reporting has to be defensible to a board. The industry's standing answer to that is people — add a publisher, add a coordinator, add a services team.

Which means the math only ever works for the biggest players. University presses, scholarly societies, independents, the specialists holding the deepest archives in their fields — they get told to wait their turn.

They've been told to wait before. It has not historically gone well for them.

A fleet of agents changes that math completely. If serving the thousandth publisher costs roughly what serving the fifth costs, the long tail stops being a rounding error and becomes the market. That's the difference between an industry with thirty publishers in it and one with three thousand.

Right now the thing between us and that is a ceiling, and the ceiling is one person's calendar. Mine. Every publisher we sign routes more of the work through me, which makes me the most limiting constraint in the company.

That's the job. Remove the ceiling.

What you'd own

Publisher success from the moment the contract is signed.

Sales gets them signed. Everything after that is yours — onboarding, delivery, the relationship, the solutions, the renewal that never has to become a rescue. Our AI-platform partnerships stay with me. The publishers would be yours.

And in equal measure, in the same job: the AI tooling that makes that possible at a hundred publishers.

Those aren't two halves competing for your week. They're the same thing. Every agent you build buys back hours, and those hours go into the conversations that genuinely need a person in them. Build well and you get to be more present with publishers, not less.

Treat me as a resource rather than an approver. Pull me into the conversations where I'm actually useful, and the default should be that you don't need to. If a publisher's technical lead has a question at 4pm, you're who they ask — not who asks me.

What you'd build

This job is half strategy, half hands on the keys. You'd help decide what we build and then go build it. If either half sounds like it should be somebody else's job, this isn't the role.

The agentic publisher infrastructure, with me. The system that brings a publisher on, watches their content the whole way through, answers their questions, notices when something's wrong before they do, keeps their reporting straight, and pulls in a human only when a human genuinely adds something.

Then you'd make it work for the hundredth publisher as well as it works for the fifth.

You'd do that inside the Cashmere OS — our internal operating system — writing code alongside Claude Code or Codex, building and extending the agents that run customer operations. Not filing requests with engineering. Building it.

The target is 100 publishers served by you and a system you built. Past that we'll talk about whether you need help, and you'll have earned strong opinions by then.

What the day-to-day looks like

A representative Wednesday:

9:00 — Team sync. Twenty minutes, then everyone's back to work.

9:30 — Weekly touchbase with an enterprise client. Fifteen people on their side. You set the agenda, you run it, and you leave with an owner and a date on everything that came up.

11:00 — Kickoff with a new publisher. Their technical lead, their commercial lead, a few colleagues. An hour on what they're trying to accomplish, what their content looks like, how it gets to us, and what the first ninety days should feel like.

12:30 — A current client, one of the largest publishers in the world. Less about what's broken, more about what they want to do next and whether we can support it.

1:30 — Ticket review with our GTM lead and our CTO. Eight open items, line by line, against real issues.

2:30 — A solutions call. A publisher wants to do something the product doesn't do yet. You work out what they're actually after, then decide what's a config change, what's a roadmap item, and what you can build this week.

3:30 onward — The block. Email, Slack, and the OS. Answering the publisher questions that came in overnight, writing the status update that tells a client exactly where their open items stand, and building the thing that means you won't have to write that update by hand next month.

That's the job on day one. Your job is to make sure it doesn't look like that in a year — that the status updates write themselves, the loops close without anyone chasing them, and what's left on the calendar is the part where a person talks to another person about something that actually matters.

The through-line: you listen, you diagnose, you build, and you make sure it got all the way to the end of the row. Nobody here is going to check whether you closed the loop.

Required skills

You build with AI by default. Show us what you've made — repos, transcripts, deployed things, in the tools you made them in. We're listening for how you think, not what you've subscribed to.

You're relentlessly curious. The rate limiter on AI isn't technical depth. It's how often you ask whether there's a faster way. The tools change monthly, and anyone who learned them once is already behind.

You write code and ship it. Enough to work in our codebase. "Technical enough to talk to engineers" isn't this job.

You listen. People don't ask for what they need. They ask for what they assume is on offer. You keep asking until you understand what someone's actually trying to do — then you go build it, instead of writing it down for somebody else to build.

You'd rather be wrong quickly than right slowly. Mistakes find the edge of what works. Analysis paralysis never gets there. Have an opinion, ship it, watch, change your mind without ceremony.

You know when to pick up the phone. Relationships in this industry are everything. These are institutions with long memories, and a publisher who trusts you will tell you things that never make it into a ticket. So the judgment that matters most here is knowing which moments deserve a human voice and which ones an agent should have handled before anyone noticed. Get that line wrong in one direction and you never scale. Get it wrong in the other and you lose the account.

You close the loop. You set the agenda, run the call, and leave with an owner and a date on every item. Then those dates hold — theirs and ours. Pleasant and relentless at the same time is most of this job.

You get to root cause. Anyone can clear a symptom. There's a difference between being great at answering email and building the spam filter. We're hiring the second one.

You're probably a fit if

• You're a technical product manager happiest in front of customers, or a solutions/customer-operations leader who ships code. Either direction works; we need both halves in one person.
• You've automated your own job away at least once, deliberately, and were pleased about it.
• Your first instinct with a repetitive process is to delete it, not document it.
• You're the person who ends up building the internal tool nobody asked for, because the alternative was doing it by hand forever.
• You want leverage more than headcount. Your team here is the people beside you, not the people under you.
• You've been the person who could have run the account if someone had just let you, and you've been waiting for somebody to hand you the keys.
• You've worked with publishers, media, or another industry where the counterparty is a cautious institution with a long memory. Or you'll learn it fast, because publishing has its own physics.
• You've watched an industry get flattened by a platform shift and thought there was a version where that didn't have to happen.

You're probably not a fit if

• You enjoy long meetings where requirements get discussed and somebody else goes away to solve the problem. The person we're looking for would rather jump in and solve it themselves — partly because they know how, and partly because they can't stand waiting for someone else to get to it.
• You want to manage people.
• You need a defined function to step into. You'd be forming this one as you go.
• You'd rather be right in the design review than shipping in production.
• You want to set AI strategy and hand the building to someone else. Half of this job is strategy. The other half is you, in the repo, at 3:30.

The details

Remote, and a small team — which cuts both ways: enormous scope, real ownership, nowhere to hide.

Nobody will report to you. You will get every bit of agentic access and tooling you ask for, a real budget for it, and no permission slips.

Comp is competitive, the equity is meaningful, and we'll talk numbers early rather than waste your time.

Part of the process is you building something in front of us. Bring your own tools.