Why this role exists

The team has a Lead, and direction is well set — the agentic system is their initiative. But that same person also heads the part-time jobs vertical. Two significant roles, one person's bandwidth means the time available for paid growth is limited. Day-to-day operations are covered by a colleague who is new to growth — at this budget scale, incrementality judgment, bidding strategy, and experiment design sit beyond their current experience. What's missing isn't direction; it's an experienced operator running the function full-time. That colleague will continue on execution under you.

That explains the present state: no incrementality testing has ever been run, a hyper-local product bids uniformly nationwide, angle tests run without pre-registered sample sizes or stopping rules, and close to half the team still performs work the platforms have automated. Conservatively, eight figures of annual efficiency sits unclaimed here.

Platform automation has absorbed most manual optimization headroom — the ceiling isn't operational precision. Experiment design and analytical judgment are the core skills; knowing the Meta interface is table stakes.

What you'll own

• Cross-channel budget reallocation grounded in incrementality
• Standardizing how angles get tested — the most concrete gap today: pre-registered sample sizes and power calculations, success criteria and stopping rules set before launch, a consistent control, a structured test log, and strict separation of message tests from creative tests (never vary both). Testing happens today, but conclusions are of uncertain reliability: the true hit rate is unknown, and winners may have been killed while noise was kept
• Guardrails and supervision for the agentic bidding system: approval thresholds, audit logs, rollback, enforced holdouts, and when to trust it versus intervene. The Lead sets system direction; this role owns rollout and risk control
• Rollout of geo-tiered bidding
• Extracting platform support — at this spend level you should have rep support, lift studies, and alpha access
• Rebalancing the team: nearly half of it still does work the platforms have automated

What we're looking for

• 7+ years in app UA, having independently run $30M+ per year — small-budget experience doesn't transfer; this bar is firm
• You can answer: “Given a system that reallocates budget automatically, how do you stop it from moving spend toward zero-incrementality inventory?”
• You've cut spend that looked good in the dashboard but wasn't incremental
• You design your own experiments, including power calculations and stopping rules
• You've managed 4+ people, including at least one non-buying function (analytics, creative, or engineering)
• Industry open

First 90 days

• Audit optimization events: how much budget sits on installs versus downstream value
• With the Growth DS, translate the first incrementality readout into actual budget shifts
• Stand up the two-layer testing framework and ring-fence an exploration budget