Meet the PlayerZero Team: Lara Stiris, Head of Growth Marketing

Meet the data-driven marketer who built PlayerZero’s growth marketing function from the ground up.

As a founding marketer, Lara Stiris runs everything from brand and content to demand gen and experimentation at PlayerZero. 

Her path to the AI Production Engineering platform has taken her through some of the most demanding environments in tech. She’s spent most of her career in developer and technical marketing roles at companies like Twitch and AWS, and startups including PubNub and Vonage API Platform, learning how to communicate the story of complex systems to equally technical audiences.

That mix of hands-on experience and big-company rigor meant she was ready to walk into PlayerZero and build marketing from a blank slate. When she arrived, there was no existing marketing stack to inherit. She built it herself, with tools and systems she knew could grow with the company.

But Lara didn’t come to PlayerZero just for the challenge. She came for the problem at the heart of PlayerZero's mission.

The opportunity first appeared when a recruiter from Foundation Capital reached out. She took the call casually, expecting nothing more than a conversation. Instead, she found herself deep in discussion with Animesh Koratana, PlayerZero’s founder, about a space she knew well: developer tooling and the hidden complexity of large codebases.

What stood out wasn’t just the product, but the way the team operated. They were direct about the role, clear about expectations, and honest about what they were trying to build.

“The product was really interesting,” Lara says. “It was AI, but meaningful AI—not just another LLM wrapper.” After 15 years in tech and experience across nearly every company size, she knew the combination of people, problem, and opportunity was rare enough to be worth the leap. “I really believe in the vision,” she adds.

Today, Lara is focused on how modern growth works in a noisy, AI-saturated market. She’s experimenting with the evolving world of search, testing how answer engine optimization compares to traditional SEO, and launching new pages to see what actually drives qualified traffic. In parallel, she’s exploring influencer marketing as a kind of “new PR” for technical buyers—identifying who actually shapes opinion in the space and building relationships with them directly.

A lot of her work comes down to judgment. Knowing when to use AI, when not to, and how to cut through noise with real perspective. “You can get something that’s good enough from a model,” she says. “But to really stand out, you need to think deeply and have a point of view.”

Sometimes that point of view shows up in unexpected places.

One day, after keeping PlayerZero’s social presence polished and buttoned up, Lara posted a meme on LinkedIn poking fun at the context graph trend that had been flooding developer feeds. 

It took off. A CTO commented. She turned his reply into a follow-up meme. Weeks later, that same CTO posted to his network asking if anyone could vouch for PlayerZero. It was a small moment, but a meaningful one—proof that timely, human marketing could still break through.

Outside of work, even Lara’s snack preferences are specific, including her choice of apples. “I’ve been an apple person pretty much my whole life,” she says. Her favorite kind? Honeycrisp. And, as a teenager, she taught herself HTML from a thousand-page book she bought at Borders to manually code a Harry Potter fan site—long before “vibe coding” was a thing. “I wanted to make a sorting hat quiz,” she says. “I was very proud of myself.”