Associate Director, Performance Marketing

About Operator

Operator is a boutique, expert-led growth consultancy headquartered in Brooklyn, NY.

We raise the growth trajectory of B2C and B2B companies (e.g. The Farmer's Dog, Capital One Shopping, Tory Burch, Bitwise, Retool, Snyk, and many more) through customer acquisition and demand generation.

We specialize in paid media (Google, Meta, LinkedIn), and we're proficient in analytics, CRO, and SEO. We provide service as either a fractional VP of Growth or an agency.

Our goal is to maximize the return of our clients' time, effort, and capital. We want to bring high agency to an industry where it's difficult to make great growth hires—be it in-house, an agency, or a freelancer.

We believe a lean, high output team can significantly create and capture more value than legacy agencies, in-house teams, and independent freelancers.

Notably, we don't believe in account managers. We believe in people who are excellent in their craft to manage the project, communication, and outcomes, so we pair our subject matter experts directly with our clients.

About the Role

We're hiring a motivated, reliable, and competent Acquisition marketer to join our thriving team. You will lead a portfolio of client engagements, across a diverse set of industries, that best match your skill, will, and experience. You will be responsible for delivering A+ strategy, communication, and execution to achieve their goals.

You will lead the client and team to do the right things well. While we have a very collaborative culture, you will be expected to operate autonomously in this role and with a high degree of trust, agency, and ownership.

We optimized for clarity, over inspiration, in writing this job description, to give you an accurate impression of the role.

Responsibilities

Strategy

Determine the right combination of goals, KPIs, channels, strategies, and tactics to achieve a client's desired outcomes.

• Lead customer acquisition or demand generation strategy, execution, reporting, and management across core channels—Google, Meta, or LinkedIn. Experiment with secondary channels—TikTok, Reddit, AppLovin, etc.
• Build alignment with key stakeholders through clear onboarding, planning, expectation setting, and acknowledging risks.
• Gain and apply a deep understanding of our clients' industries, offerings, positioning, and marketing.
• Understand a client's business, goals, and constraints to inform goal setting, forecasting, budgeting, and media mix.
• Conduct a thorough assessment of a client's current and historical marketing activities, paired with observations and recommendations.
• Develop a 90-day roadmap with prioritized actions, based on impact, effort, and confidence.

Fulfillment

Execute on the strategy with high operational excellence and agency, from start to finish.

• Provide ongoing strategy, management, reporting, and optimization throughout the engagement.
• Adjust key levers across the media mix, ad platforms, or website experience to best achieve volume (net margin, revenue, leads, opportunities) or efficiency (CAC, ROAS, CPL, CPO) goals.
• Conduct split testing from end-to-end, including hypothesis formation, duration estimation, impact sizing, analysis, and reporting.
• Achieve the optimal allocation of resources (time, budget, activities) across channels, projects, and clients.
• Project manage each engagement with clear tasks, owners, deadlines, and deliverables.
• Complete projects effectively and efficiently—on time, within budget, and with exceptional quality.
• Keep key stakeholders (internal and external) informed of progress, blockers, and requirements.

Reporting, Measurement, & Communication

Use reports and dashboards to monitor progress toward goals, and identify trends and changes that require analysis and action.

• Lead client meetings with expertise and empathy, and respond promptly to email and Slack correspondence.
• Prepare a weekly agenda and meeting document that synthesizes observations, recommendations, and actions tailored to a client's specific KPIs.
• Build trust by leading meetings with expertise and empathy, and responding promptly to email and Slack correspondence.
• Conduct root cause analyses, visualize data, and share insights using any combination of ad platforms, Shopify, GA4, Looker, PostHog, or other data sources.
• Provide regular feedback in all directions for ways we can raise the quality of work, the ease with which we do it, or both.

Systems, Marketing, and Kaizen

Help Operator build key processes and best practices that we apply internally and share externally.

• Develop standard operating procedures (SOPs) to raise the quality, speed, or ease with which we work.
• Contribute to marketing materials (e.g. capabilities deck, case studies) and publishing our learnings, building thought leadership for both yourself and Operator.
• Aid Operator in forming its expert Point of View and publishing consistently to relevant platforms.

Requirements

Must-have

• High slope. 5+ years of experience is nice, but we're most interested in your trajectory, not how many years you've been at it.
• Mastery of key advertising platforms. Google Ads, Meta, or both are a must-have. LinkedIn, Reddit, and other channels are nice-to-have.
• Customer journey acumen. You are able to walk through, analyze, and share recommendations for each step of the customer journey.
• Thoughtful experimentation. You gather and analyze data to form hypotheses, develop experiments, and prioritize based on effort, impact, and confidence.
• High analytical aptitude. You are fluent in Google Sheets, and can swiftly and clearly gather, analyze, summarize, and visualize data to communicate insights.
• Fast rate of change. You receive feedback well, learn quickly from experience, and actively adjust your internal 'map' to match the 'territory.'
• Responsible project and budget management. You deliver projects on time, within budget, and to spec.
• Overcommunication. You practice the type of communication that keeps a solid working rhythm when working remotely.
• Meet clients where they are. You are just as comfortable diving into the details with a seasoned Chief Revenue Officer as you are explaining how text ads work to a less-experienced client.
• Live Q&A. You can strategize, problem solve, debug, and think through scenarios in real time with our clients and team.
• Hands on. You do what's required to get the job done.
• Leave things better than you found them. We're believers in continuous improvement.

Nice-to-have

• Incrementality testing, MTA and MMM approaches and technologies. You've built your own attribution methods, understand the tradeoffs of various models, and you've used tools like TripleWhale, Northbeam, Haus, etc.
• Earned & Owned media experience. It's helpful to understand the relationship between Paid, Earned, and Owned, and make recommendations accordingly.
• Creative briefing. You enjoy reviewing, briefing, and analyzing creative.
• Rules & automations. You have built rules and automations to improve manual operations.
• AI workflows. You have included LLMs into your workflows.

Why join us

• Work with high-performing clients. We work with many fast-growing companies and disruptor brands led by seasoned, influential chief revenue officers, chief marketing officers, private equity firms, and heads of marketing.
• Be part of a driven team. Work with a team of other fast moving platform experts who are never satisfied with current performance and always looking for ways to continue elevating client accounts and improving their bottom line.
• We're lean and low on fluff. You won't be burdened by busy work, managing up, or other red tape and discouraging norms that occupy larger organizations.
• Work in a supportive environment. We treat each other like peers and adults, and we believe we do our best work in a collaborative environment, with a little friendly competition.