OpenAI

Growth Lead, SMB Ads

OpenAI$120K — $150K *
Business Services
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years in growth marketing or related fields with a focus on SMBs
  • Hands-on experience with performance marketing and demand generation
  • Proficient in funnel analysis and experimental growth techniques
  • Strong collaboration skills with Product and Engineering teams
  • Familiarity with AI tools for marketing workflows
  • Ability to communicate complex concepts in simple terms for small business audiences
  • Experience with major advertising platforms like Google Ads or Meta Ads

Responsibilities

  • Develop acquisition and activation strategies for SMB advertisers
  • Analyze and optimize the advertiser funnel from awareness to first spend
  • Own multi-channel SMB acquisition initiatives and optimize performance
  • Collaborate with Product and Engineering to enhance user experiences
  • Translate customer insights into actionable marketing strategies
  • Leverage AI for quicker experimentation and growth tactics
  • Establish regular processes for performance evaluation and growth decisions
  • Define and shape the future of the acquisition and activation function

Benefits

  • Flexible working environment
  • Opportunity to work with innovative AI tools
  • Career growth in a rapidly evolving company
  • Cross-functional collaboration with diverse teams
  • Impactful role in transforming SMB advertising experience
Full Job Description
About the Role

We are hiring a Growth Lead, SMB Ads to build and scale how small businesses discover, adopt, and grow with OpenAI's advertising platform. This person will own acquisition and activation growth for SMB advertisers, with a focus on bringing new advertisers into the funnel and helping them reach first meaningful spend.

This is a strategic and hands-on growth role at the intersection of acquisition, activation, performance marketing, product-led growth, experimentation, and advertiser education. You will diagnose where the funnel is constrained, define and run high-impact experiments, improve sign-up and onboarding journeys, and partner with product teams to make the advertiser experience clearer, faster, and more effective.

You will use data, customer insight, and AI-native workflows to move quickly from problem diagnosis to shipped growth programs. Over time, this role is expected to help shape the acquisition and activation function for SMB Ads as the team grows.

In This Role, You Will:
  • Develop and execute acquisition and activation strategies that help SMB advertisers discover, sign up for, and begin spending on OpenAI's advertising platform.
  • Diagnose the advertiser funnel across awareness, landing pages, sign-up, onboarding, campaign creation, first spend, and early repeat spend.
  • Own the SMB acquisition strategy across paid, organic search (SEO & GEO), social, partnerships, referrals, product-led growth, and emerging channels, continuously optimizing channel mix, CAC, activation, and first-sp
  • Partner with Product and Engineering to improve sign-up flows, onboarding, campaign setup, billing, measurement, and first-spend experiences.
  • Translate SMB customer insight into positioning, messaging, funnel improvements, advertiser education, and product feedback.
  • Use AI tools to accelerate experimentation, analysis, prototyping, campaign development, creative variation, and internal growth workflows.
  • Build operating rhythms for experiment planning, performance readouts, funnel diagnostics, and cross-functional growth decisions.
  • Work with contractors, agencies, or growth operators as needed to increase execution velocity.
  • Help define how the acquisition and activation function should scale over time.

You Might Thrive in This Role If You:
  • Have significant experience in growth marketing, product growth, performance marketing, demand generation, or SMB go-to-market roles with measurable ownership of acquisition, activation, or revenue outcomes.
  • Have improved self-serve, product-led, SMB, merchant, advertiser, or high-volume customer funnels & can move from strategy to execution quickly
  • Are highly analytical and comfortable using funnel analysis, cohort analysis, experimentation, and business metrics to make decisions.
  • Have strong product instincts and can partner closely with Product, Engineering, and Data Science to improve conversion and customer experience.
  • Are AI-native in how you work, using tools to move faster, generate leverage, prototype ideas, analyze data, and improve marketing workflows.
  • Can simplify complex advertising products into clear, compelling narratives for small business owners, operators, and marketers.
  • Have experience growing advertisers, merchants, creators, or SMB customers through scaled self-serve platforms such as Google Ads, Meta Ads, TikTok for Business, Amazon Ads, Reddit,, Shopify, Square, Intuit, HubSpot, or similar.
  • Have experience with advertiser acquisition, campaign launch, measurement, CAC, payback, LTV, retention, or spend expansion.
  • Thrive in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where you are building new growth systems from the ground up.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory consisting of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc. The company was founded in 2015 by a group of technology leaders, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and John Schulman. OpenAI's mission is to develop and promote friendly AI for the betterment of humanity. The company has developed a number of cutting-edge AI technologies, including GPT-3, a language processing system that can generate human-like text. OpenAI has received funding from a number of high-profile investors, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
Learn more about OpenAI
Size
100 employees
Industry
Founded
2015

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