Performance Marketing Lead (Contract)

We are hiring a Performance Marketing Lead to own acquisition execution and measurement end to end. This role is responsible for generating profitable attention, traffic, and qualified leads through a mix of paid channels, performance partnerships (affiliates and referrals), and scalable distribution. You will run day-to-day campaign operations, leverage AI throughout your process, build repeatable growth experiments, and maintain rigorous attribution from click to CRM to revenue outcomes.

This is a builder role, not just of channels and programs, but of how modern acquisition gets done. You'll bring tools, workflows, and a point of view we don't have today and raise the ceiling for what a lean team can produce. You must have proven you can take a channel or acquisition program from scratch and scale it. Success is measured in business results, not activity metrics. You will build and own:

• A diversified acquisition engine that produces qualified leads consistently
• Reliable attribution and reporting that ties spend to opportunity and revenue outcomes
• An experimentation cadence that scales winners and kills underperformers quickly — with the discipline to do both fast
• A performance partnership channel (affiliates, referrals) that becomes a meaningful source of pipeline
• An AI-powered operating model that raises the team's ceiling. Your choice of tools, and you’ll build the workflows that generate results and show us what's possible

What You'll Own:

Paid Acquisition (60%)

• You own paid acquisition from spend to revenue outcome. That means hitting payback period targets, improving unit economics over time, and making disciplined channel decisions based on what the data actually says
• Daily optimization: bid strategies, audience refinement, creative testing, landing page variants
• Weekly decision-making: scale, iterate, or kill based on actual MAC and conversion data
• You manage the budget like it's your money because we track every dollar to closed revenue

Performance Partnerships (20%)

• Build and manage affiliate/referral programs that generate qualified merchant leads
• Recruit partners, negotiate terms, create offers that convert
• Own tracking infrastructure so we know exactly what drives what
• Merchant comparison sites, industry aggregators, referral networks—if it performs, you scale it

Growth Experiments (20%)

• Find channels our competitors haven't discovered or exhausted yet
• Test unconventional tactics: Reddit communities, vertical-specific forums, niche directories
• Launch rapid experiments with clear hypotheses and kill criteria
• Build and run agentic AI workflows that compress testing cycles — automated variant generation, performance reads, and iteration loops with minimal manual intervention

What Success Looks Like:

You achieve MAC/payback periods at target and keep it there or, better. You do that by staying close to the data, killing what isn't working without sentiment, and doubling down on what is. The budget here isn't fixed but grows as the unit economics justify.

You run a constant testing loop. There's always an experiment running, always a hypothesis being validated or killed. You're not waiting for permission to try something new, and you're not holding on to campaigns out of inertia.

You feed sales leads that are actually worth their time. You stay close to close rates and disqualification reasons, and you let that feedback reshape targeting, qualification filters, and channel mix. If sales are burning hours on bad leads, that's your problem to fix.

Over time, you build a diversified acquisition engine, not one channel with everything riding on it. Paid search anchors it early, but affiliates, partnerships, and unconventional channels earn their place by performing, not by existing.

The scoreboard is simple: merchants acquired, MAC by channel, lead-to-approval rate, and payback period. If those move in the right direction, you get more to work with. If they don't, we find out why and fix it fast.

Who You Are:

You will be measured on outcomes that matter: MAC by channel, monthly merchants acquired, lead-to-customer conversion rate, LTV:MAC ratio, and payback period. Not impressions. Not engagement. Not clicks. Revenue.

Must Haves:

• 3-5+ years running profitable paid acquisition in B2B SaaS, fintech, payments, or similarly competitive markets, experience with application or underwriting a plus
• You've personally managed tens of thousands in monthly ad spend and can show the MAC, conversion rates, and ROAS you achieved
• Built something from zero to scale, not just optimized existing programs
• Deep ad platform fluency: campaign structure, bidding strategies, Quali