Brand Specialist (Arlington)

Brand Specialist — Maritime Client

Location: Arlington, VA · hybrid (3 days in-office) Compensation : $55,000 – $75,000 base & benefits Employment type: Full-time

About the company

The world's oceans are its busiest highways, and most of them are invisible in real time. Our client is fixing that. They turn civilian and commercial vessels into a distributed sensing layer — HD cameras, SATCOM, onboard AI — and stitch the data into a live picture of global maritime activity. Their platform is deployed with federal customers and across a growing fleet of partner vessels, supporting coast guards, navies, insurers, and researchers. They're a small, fast-moving team in Arlington, Virginia, building hardware, software, and an entirely new category of maritime intelligence. They're hiring quickly, showing up at conferences from Miami to Alaska, and landing on more stages every month — and they need someone to make sure they look and sound as sharp as the product does.

About the role

This is a brand ownership role, not an outreach marketing role. The product speaks for itself in front of the right rooms; what's needed is consistency in every surface that represents the company — conference banners, booth collateral, pamphlet ads, LinkedIn posts, hiring content, decks, swag, and the thousand small things that get thrown together when a team is growing as fast as this one is.

You'll sit on the Growth team and work across the entire company — Growth, People Ops,

Leadership, Engineering — to turn the existing brand kit into something everyone actually uses.

You'll translate what you hear in senior meetings into materials that land with the right audiences, and you'll own the details that make the company feel bigger and more intentional than a 50-person startup has any right to.

If you're an English major with graphic-design instincts and strong opinions about typography, you will feel at home.

What you'll own

Brand consistency across the company. Take the existing brand kit (logos, vector files, palette) and turn it into a living system every team pulls from instead of recreating. Conference and event collateral. Booth graphics, pamphlet ad slots, sponsored-content placements, printed one-pagers, giveaway design. The team travels — expect eMerge-scale moments and smaller maritime-industry events throughout the year.

LinkedIn and written comms. Weekly cadence. The company is hiring aggressively; every post

matters for recruiting. You'll own the voice, not outsource it to a bot.Swag. Hats, poker chips, t-shirts, and whatever the next conference calls for. Vendor relationships, ordering, inventory, design. Decks and proposal design. Partner with leadership on investor, customer, and government-facing materials so they feel like the brand, not Canva defaults.

Cross-team design support. Be the person Growth and People Ops call when they need something done right the first time.

What success looks like in six months

The brand kit is the source of truth, and no one is designing from scratch anymore. Every conference the team shows up to has materials that feel like they came from the same company.

The LinkedIn presence is consistent, on-voice, and drawing inbound candidates.

Swag orders run on a predictable cadence without becoming a fire drill.

The Growth team comes to you before an event, not after.

You'll be a fit if

You can command the written word — clean copy, sharp headlines, no AI smell.

You have real design chops in Canva and Adobe Illustrator (or Figma/InDesign equivalents).

You know when a layout is off even if you can't immediately say why.

You use AI tools as an accelerator, not a crutch. You've seen the difference between a QR-code-

and-blurb that someone made in 10 minutes and one that looks like it belongs on the booth.

You're comfortable sitting in on leadership and Growth meetings, picking up context, and turning what you heard into the right asset without a formal brief.

You work well with senior operators and with people who just need a t-shirt order placed — same energy for both.

You can be in the Arlington office three days a week.

Experience

The company is open on years — this role can work for someone a year or two out of undergrad

(an English / comms / design major from a strong school, hungry to prove themselves and grow

toward a broader go-to-market role) or for a more experienced individual contributor who has

been squeezed by how the market treats designers and writers right now and wants real ownership inside a mission-driven company. Show us the work; we'll read the résumé second.