Head of Events & Field Marketing

Overview

You'll own Traversal's entire field marketing and events strategy—deciding which conferences to attend, designing booth experiences that stand out, and running intimate user events that actually generate pipeline. You're selling AI-powered incident response to DevOps leads and SRE managers at enterprise software companies, which means your job is to get technical practitioners to stop at your booth and engage with the product story in rooms full of competing observability/incident response vendors.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Early-stage (likely Seed/Series A based on 58 employees)

Size: 58 employees

Growth: Doubled in size since Fall 2025, planning major event expansion in 2026

Market Position: Category challenger in crowded incident response/observability space (competing against PagerDuty, Datadog, ServiceNow, etc.)

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 30% Targeted events (the motion you validated last year)
• 40% Outbound (likely sales team cold prospecting into DevOps orgs)
• 30% Product-led/community (technical buyers researching solutions)

Your Role in the Funnel: You're generating top-of-funnel awareness and creating air cover for sales. Most of your "wins" won't close for 3-6 months after initial event contact.

Support Structure: Small company means you'll work directly with founders, sales leadership, and product. No big team beneath you initially—you're building the function.

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: PagerDuty, Datadog, ServiceNow, Splunk On-Call, plus newer AI-first incident response tools

How They Differentiate: AI-powered root cause analysis that claims to cut incident resolution from hours to minutes (vs traditional alerting/on-call tools)

Common Objections: "We already have PagerDuty/Datadog", "How is this different from our existing observability stack?", "Do we need another tool?"

Win Themes: Speed to resolution, reducing alert noise, AI-driven automation vs manual runbooks

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Event Planning (30%) | Event Execution (25%) | Post-Event Follow-up (15%) | Strategy/Reporting (15%) | Vendor/Partner Management (15%)

Key Activities

• Conference Selection & Planning: Research which DevOps/SRE conferences your buyers actually attend (KubeCon, AWS re:Invent, Monitorama, SREcon, etc.), negotiate booth space, and build event calendar. You'll spend hours comparing ROI from past small events to decide where to bet bigger in 2026.
• Booth/Experience Design: Design booth presence that doesn't look like every other observability vendor. The post emphasizes "not blending into a sea of identical booths"—you'll need creative ideas for demos, swag, and interactions that get technical people to stop and engage.
• Intimate User Events: Run smaller dinner/roundtable events with 15-20 target accounts in key cities. These work better than giant conferences for enterprise deals but require significant planning and relationship-building with existing customers who can bring peers.
• Post-Event Pipeline Tracking: Follow up with badge scans, coordinate with sales on warm intros, measure which events actually generate pipeline vs just brand awareness. You'll fight with sales about lead quality and whether that $50K conference sponsorship was worth it.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Crowded Market: Incident response/observability conferences have 20+ vendors with similar messaging. Getting technical practitioners to care about "yet another AI tool" when they're overwhelmed with alerts already is tough.
• Long Attribution Cycles: Someone who stops at your booth in March might not close until September. You'll constantly be justifying event ROI to leadership when pipeline takes quarters to materialize.
• Solo Operator Initially: At 58 people, you won't have a team. You're booking venues, designing swag, coordinating logistics, staffing booths, and doing post-event follow-up yourself (or with freelance help you manage). It's a lot of operational grunt work, not just strategy.
• Budget Scrutiny: You'll be asking for $500K+ to scale the event program, and every dollar will be questioned. Expect to build detailed ROI models and defend why that tier-1 conference sponsorship is worth 10x your tier-3 options.

What Success Looks Like

• You generate 30-40% of the company's qualified pipeline from events and field activities by end of 2026
• Sales team consistently says "our best deals come from your events"
• You create 2-3 "signature moments" (booth experiences, dinner series, speaking slots) that people in the DevOps community actually remember and talk about

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers:

• VP/Director of Engineering (budget holder)
• Head of DevOps/SRE (primary user/influencer)
• Platform Engineering leads

What They Care About:

• Reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) for incidents
• Cutting down alert noise and on-call fatigue for their teams
• ROI in terms of engineering hours saved per incident
• Integration with existing observability stack (Datadog, Splunk, etc.)

Requirements

• 5+ years in field marketing or events, ideally in DevOps/infrastructure/observability space
• Experience building event programs from scratch (not just maintaining existing playbooks)
• Portfolio showing creative booth/event designs that stood out from competitors
• Comfort with technical buyers—you need to understand SRE/DevOps pain points well enough to brief booth staff and shape event messaging
• Strong project management skills—you'll be juggling 10-15 events simultaneously with tons of logistics
• Willingness to travel 40-50% (conferences are nights/weekends, not just booth hours)
• Experience measuring event ROI and pipeline attribution in a CRM