SEO Manager (AI-First)

Company Mission

Payhawk is a leading global spend management solution for scaling businesses. Headquartered in London and combining company cards, reimbursable expenses and accounts payable into a single product; its future-facing technology enables finance teams to control and automate company spending at scale.

The Payhawk customer base includes fast-growing and mature multinational companies in 32 countries including LuxAir, Quantive, and Wagestream. With offices in New York, London, Berlin, Munich , Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam, Vilnius and Sofia; Payhawk is backed by renowned investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greenoaks, QED Investors, Bek Ventures and Eleven Ventures.

Our values include supporting flat hierarchies, taking ownership and responsibility, seeking and providing feedback, managing constructive critique, and speaking our minds. We understand that the best ideas don’t all come from the same place, so we encourage diversity and inclusion in all areas of our work.

The future of fintech is about more than money, and we believe in work-life balance, continual learning, and empowered teams. We’re also on a journey to measure and improve our environmental and social impact. From virtual cards to digital subscriptions, our software and automation help take paper out of the equation for our customers, too.

We’re changing the world of payments, and we’re looking for an exceptional team to help us. 

About the role

Search is no longer just “10 blue links.” With Google’s AI Overviews now surfacing in more than half of all queries and zero-click behaviour topping 60 % of searches,  plus chatbots shaping how brands get mentioned, we need an SEO manager who can engineer visibility across both classic and AI-driven touchpoints. You’ll work closely with our SEO Team Lead - contributing insights, experiments, and hands-on optimisations that inform the overall strategy - then drive the execution that makes it real. From technical fixes to content refinements and structured-data engineering, you’ll help ensure our brand is cited, surfaced and trusted across both traditional and AI-driven search experiences.

Responsibilities

AI-First Search & Brand Visibility

• Optimise content to win inclusion in AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT answers and other LLM surfaces
• Monitor our brand’s citation frequency, sentiment and context across AI agents; adjust content to improve “mention share”
• Design schema/structured-data strategies that help machines understand and quote us 
• AB-test prompts, schema variants and content formats to isolate uplift in AI outcomes

Content & On-Page Excellence

• Manage content creation of “people-first” content that demonstrates depth, experience and E-E-A-T

• Build topic clusters and entity maps that signal topical authority (vs. single-keyword focus) 
• Implement snippet-ready copy patterns (FAQs, how-tos, lists) to capture featured snippets & AI excerpts
• Keep our internal linking architecture healthy and scalable across 8 language locales.

Technical SEO & Site Performance

• Run full site audits and prioritize technical issues for fixing with the dev team
• Ensure flawless crawlability, indexation, Core Web Vitals and Accessibility standards compliance
• Analyse log files to improve crawlability and page indexing.
• Maintain llms.txt / robots.txt 

Reporting, collaboration & education 

• Regularly track and report on SEO performance to key stakeholders (director of web presence, CMO, regional marketing teams)
• Help build dashboards that blend Search Console, AI-visibility tools and LLM-scrape data to track new KPIs (citation rate, answer share, attribution clicks)

• Partner with Product, Content, PR and the Web Dev team to embed AI-search best practices
• Support the SEO team lead in training writers and stakeholders on generative engine optimisation advances and guidelines

Requirements

Must-haves

• Located in Sofia and happy to work from our Sofia office 4 days per week. 
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English.
• 5 + years full-stack SEO with demonstrable wins in organic growth and technical site health
• Hands-on experience optimising for AI-driven SERP features (e.g., SGE/AI Overviews, ChatGPT Browse, Perplexity) 
• Strong technical toolkit: schema.org, JSON-LD, CWV,  llms.txt / robots controls, regex.
• Familiar with accessibility standards (WCAG) and testing tools (WAVE, Lighthouse).
• Content leadership: ability to brief, edit and QA high-E-E-A-T long-form that aligns to search intent, structure, and brand voice., plus on-page UX fundamentals
• Advanced user of Ahrefs/Semrush, Screaming Frog, Lumar (or similar), plus an AI-visibility tracker.
• Uses AI (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) as an accelerator with critical judgement.
• Solid understanding of the marketing funnel and how it relates to organic strategy and content formats.
• Self-directed yet collaborative across content, design, product marketing, and dev teams.

Nice to haves

• Prior work with brand-SERP or mention-share tracking platforms (e.g., Profound, Brandtech, Peec.AI)
• Data fluency: expertise with Looker Studio or similar; comfortable crafting custom reports
• Log-file analysis experience (e.g., Screaming Frog Log File Analyser, Splunk).
• Hands-on with CMSs (Contentful/WordPress), project management tools (Asana, Jira) and CRMs (Salesforce, Hubspot).
• Fintech or finance-sector knowledge.
• Experience in B2B SaaS 
• Fluency in any of these languages: Spanish, French, Dutch, German

Company Benefits

• 30 days holiday paid leave
• Competitive compensation package
• One week exchange policy to another Payhawk office (London, Berlin, Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam and Vilnius)
• Flexible working hours and opportunity to work from home
• Regular team-wide events
• Additional Medical care
• Company office massages
• Personal assistant service
• MultiSport card fully funded by us
• Opportunity to use the Payhawk product