Strategy & Growth Intern

Location: San Francisco, CA (In Person, 5 days/week)

Start Date: July 6th, 2026 

Duration: 2 Months

Compensation: 30 USD/hr

Type: Internship is intended to convert to Full Time upon completion (subject to performance)

About XLR8 AI

XLR8 AI is a San Francisco-based startup that helps brands win visibility on AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Claude, and Gemini. As the world shifts from traditional SEO to AI-generated results, we're building the analytics and optimization layer for the next generation of marketing.

We've been featured in a16z's Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) report and achieved profitability in 2025. We've been growing over 20% MoM. Our clients range from high-growth startups to enterprise companies making $100M in ARR, including brands you likely use every day. 

Most SF startups are still chasing revenue. We're bootstrapped, profitable, and growing fast.

The Role

We're hiring a Strategy & Growth Intern to own client relationships and GEO outcomes for clients at XLR8 AI. This is a high-ownership role combining client success management, GEO strategy, and team leadership. Three things define success here:

1. Clients hit their visibility goals
2. Clients feel in control and confident in their strategy
3. You and your team executes reliably week over week

You'll manage a book of clients, run their weekly strategy calls, own their health metrics, drive GEO experiments on our platform, and manage a small execution team behind you. You are the person clients trust to grow their presence in AI search.

What You'll Work On

• Own the client relationship end to end: weekly strategy calls, Slack communication, progress updates, and renewal conversations. Expect to manage 20 clients.
• Track and report on client health: LLM visibility scores, target query rankings, revenue impact, and strategic goals
• Build and maintain client documentation in Notion: action items, results, meeting notes, experiment logs
• Design and run GEO experiments on the XLR8 AI platform: identify what content and signals will move the needle for each client
• Reverse-engineer how LLMs and web search pipelines evaluate and rank content, and translate that into client strategy
• Stay current on how frontier models handle web retrieval, citation, and content relevance
• Delegate execution tasks to your team, review their output, and hold quality and deadlines
• Identify platform gaps and product improvements, write clear briefs, and coordinate with engineering to ship them

Who You Are

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field
• At least 2 years of professional experience (Class of 2024 or prior)
• Extremely strong presenter: you can walk a CMO through a strategy, handle pushback, and keep 20 client meetings a week feeling sharp and high-signal
• Comfortable with GEO and SEO at a working level, ideally with enough technical depth to understand how web retrieval and LLM relevance scoring work
• Entrepreneurial and self-directing: your work is not fully defined, and you'll find new problems every week that require you to build the answer from scratch
• Confident in rooms where the stakes are high
• Willing to go above and beyond as a default, not an exception

Bonus

• Experience in a client-facing role at a startup 
• Familiarity with how LLMs use web search (RAG, citations, grounding)

What You'll Get

• Direct access to and mentorship from the CMOs and marketing leaders of some of the most recognized companies in the world
• A seat at the table as the GEO category is being defined, before it becomes mainstream
• Real ownership, real clients, real results from week one
• A company that is bootstrapped, profitable, and growing 20% MoM — you will be building something that actually works
• An industry that is genuinely exciting: AI search is how marketing is evolving, and you will be one of the people who shapes how brands participate in it

Please fill out the application form here: https://forms.gle/T3wwCuhAufoqphCx6 

Deadline: June 26th, 11:59 PM PST. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.