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Salary: USD 108,570 - 161,000 / annual
Gusto is seeking a Senior Paid Acquisition Manager to own execution across paid social and emerging acquisition channels. This is a high-visibility role at the intersection of performance marketing, channel experimentation, and AI-powered workflow design, with clear accountability to pipeline and revenue targets.
You will be embedded within Gusto's Demand Generation team, specifically the Paid Acquisition group, which operates with high autonomy, a bias for experimentation, and a culture of cross-functional partnership. The team is AI-native and moves fast.
Day-to-day responsibilities include:
- Own paid social strategy and execution across Meta, LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, and TikTok, driving full-funnel campaigns from brand awareness through retargeting and conversion, with accountability to pipeline and revenue targets.
- Manage significant multi-million dollar budgets with rigor, including campaign pacing, forecasting, budget-vs-actuals analysis, and making the case for paid social investment in imperfect attribution environments.
- Apply and help refine Gusto's paid acquisition measurement framework, including attribution philosophy and budget allocation principles, in partnership with the broader marketing team.
- Lead creative strategy and testing at scale: briefing creative studios and agencies, structuring meaningful experiments, interpreting complex data sets to drive actionable insights, and building a clear learning roadmap.
- Serve as the team's go-to expert on paid social and AI-powered marketing workflows, documenting playbooks and best practices for the paid acquisition team.
- Use AI tools as a consistent, habitual part of your workflow: generating campaign briefs, developing copy variants, accelerating audience research, and building reusable systems that raise the bar for the whole team.
- Identify, test, and validate new digital media channels and formats beyond core paid social—such as Google Demand Generation campaigns and ChatGPT ads—running structured pilots, defining success criteria upfront, and making the call on scale vs. kill within existing budget guardrails.
- Partner with Web Marketing to align on landing page strategy, message match, and post-click conversion.
- Align with the Brand and Influencer team to run the organic-to-paid feedback loop—turning proven organic and influencer content into paid scale, and feeding results back to sharpen what earns that investment next.
- Collaborate with Engineering to launch new pixels and tracking, troubleshoot platform-side issues, and QA implementations—keeping measurement reliable as tracking needs evolve.
- Partner cross-functionally with Integrated Marketing, Product Marketing, Sales, Communications, and Web to align paid social with integrated campaigns and earned media moments, and bring performance data back upstream to influence creative production and asset strategy.
About Gusto: Gusto is on a mission to grow the small business economy. The company handles payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR for more than 500,000 small businesses nationwide. All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs). AI is a fundamental part of how work gets done at Gusto, and all team members are expected to actively engage with AI tools relevant to their role.
Requirements:
- 7+ years of performance marketing experience at a B2B SaaS, performance marketing agency, or high-growth consumer organization, with deep expertise in paid social and a track record of testing and scaling new channels.
- Full-funnel ownership across two or more major paid social platforms (Meta, LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, TikTok), including deep, hands-on, in-platform execution (campaign builds, audience/targeting strategy, creative testing, bid/budget management), with significant budget responsibility and a track record of driving measurable pipeline impact.
- Strong creative strategy and testing instincts: you know how to structure a test, distinguish a learning from a result, and translate performance data into creative direction.
- AI-fluent in practice, not just in theory; you use AI tools consistently in your day-to-day workflow to accelerate briefs, copy, and analysis, and have a track record of implementing AI-driven efficiencies for your team.
- Excellent cross-functional collaborator who can translate integrated briefs into paid social strategy, advocate for what the channel needs, and work effectively alongside brand, web, and comms partners.
- Analytical and data-driven, with a clear point of view on attribution in imperfect measurement environments and comfort communicating paid social's contribution to business outcomes.
