The opportunity
A seed-funded New York startup is building autonomous AI that plans, runs and optimises paid advertising for consumer brands, doing the work that agencies and in-house media buyers do today, but faster and with far less guesswork. The founders come out of senior roles at one of the largest ad platforms on earth, where they helped take a product from zero to several hundred million dollars in annual revenue. The engineering team is small, elite and drawn from top-tier tech companies. The company is four people, closed its first funding round in 2025, and is already live with paying customers.
Right now the two founders are personally running every customer relationship. That is the bottleneck. This hire is the first person brought in to own it, which is why the title says Founding. You will take the customer side of the business off the founders’ plates, become the human face of the product for a growing book of consumer brands, and over time build the whole deployment and customer success function around you: the playbooks, the processes and eventually the team.
This is not an account management seat where you relay tickets. The AI agents do the heavy lifting inside the ad accounts; your job is to understand what they did and why, judge whether it was right, explain it to a founder or CMO in plain language, and step into the account yourself when something needs a human hand. If you have ever wished you could pair consulting-grade thinking with real hands-on media buying, and do it inside a company that is defining a new category, this is that role.
What you will do
You will own a portfolio of consumer-brand customers from onboarding onward. In practice that means:
- Run the customer relationship end to end. Weekly performance calls, quarterly reviews, the decks and collateral that go with them, and the day-to-day thread of questions from marketing leads and founders who have handed you their ad budget.
- Be the strategic advisor on paid media. Translate what the AI agents did across Meta, Google, TikTok and the rest into a clear story: what changed, why it changed, what it did to CAC and ROAS, and what happens next. Push back when a customer’s instinct is wrong and show them the data.
- Analyse ad performance and build account audits. Dig into account data, find the inefficiencies, spot the creative or targeting gaps, and turn the numbers into a narrative that a C-level audience can act on.
- Get your hands dirty in the ad accounts. When an agent needs a manual override, a campaign needs restructuring, or a new customer needs a fast fix before the automation kicks in, you go in and do it yourself. This is a hands-on seat and the founders are explicit about that.
- Feed the product. You will sit closest to the customer, so you will shape the roadmap: what the agents should do next, which signals matter, where the product confuses people.
- Build the function. Write the playbooks, define the onboarding motion, set the cadence, and as the customer base grows, hire and lead the deployment team.
You start as an individual contributor with full ownership of the customer book. The path to leading a team is real and the founders want the person who takes this seat to grow into it.
Who we are looking for
The hiring bar on this role is specific, and candidates who tick only half of it have not been getting through. Read these honestly before applying.
1. A consulting foundation, ideally at McKinsey, Bain or BCG. (Must have.)
You spent your early career in management consulting, ideally at an MBB firm, and it shows: structured thinking, comfort in front of senior clients, the habit of building a tight argument from messy data, and a work ethic calibrated to a demanding environment. Tier-two strategy firms are considered; the structured-problem-solving DNA is what matters.
2. Hands-on ads and performance marketing at a fast-growing consumer startup or an adtech startup. (Must have.)
After consulting you went deep on paid media. You have personally run campaigns inside Meta and Google ad accounts (and ideally TikTok, Pinterest or similar) for a direct-to-consumer or consumer-product brand that was scaling quickly: think the kind of DTC names in grocery, personal care, beverage or home goods that grew from a few million to tens of millions on the back of paid acquisition. Alternatively, you did equivalent hands-on work at an adtech startup building tools for those brands. Hands-on means your name was on the account and the results, not that you oversaw an agency that did it.
3. Three to fifteen years of experience that follows that arc: consulting first, then performance marketing or ads. (Baseline.)
The order matters. The founders are looking for people who learned to think at a consulting firm and then learned to execute in a growth or paid-media seat. Fifteen years is the ceiling because this is a founding IC role, not a VP-of-marketing-in-waiting.
4. Ad-performance analysis you can do yourself. (Baseline.)
You can open an account, read the data, run an audit, find where money is being wasted and judge whether a campaign is working. You can then explain all of that in a few slides to someone who does not live in the ads manager. Spreadsheet fluency is assumed; SQL or Python is a bonus.
5. You tinker and build with AI. (Baseline.)
This is a must-have, not a nice-to-have, and it is one of the most common reasons otherwise-strong candidates have been passed on. The founders want someone who is curious about AI in a practical way: you use LLMs and developer tools to automate your own work, you have built small things with agentic coding tools, you have opinions about what these systems do well and badly. Be ready to show concrete examples of things you have built, not just tools you have used.
6. High energy, strong storytelling, comfortable with executives.
You will spend your days with founders, CMOs and heads of growth. You need the pace of an early-stage startup, the ability to turn a wall of numbers into a story that lands, and the presence to run a room.
Nice to have
- A STEM degree. The founders have a strong preference for a quantitative or technical education because the work is data-heavy and the product is technical.
- A top-tier university. Not a hard filter, but the two profiles the founders hold up as the gold standard both have it.
- Exposure to measurement, attribution or incrementality work beyond platform-reported numbers.
- Experience with one or more of TikTok, Pinterest, Applovin or retail media alongside Meta and Google.
Who this is not for
To save everyone time, the founders have been clear about the profiles that do not fit:
- Pure brand marketers. If your background is brand, creative, PR or content without hands-on paid acquisition, this is not the role.
- Platform-side and agency account managers. Managing a book of advertisers at Google, Meta or TikTok, or running client relationships at an agency where someone else was in the account, does not count as hands-on performance marketing here.
- B2B SaaS demand gen. The customers are consumer brands and the founders want people who have spent money on consumer acquisition.
- General finance or private equity backgrounds. Analytical, yes, but not the ads depth this seat needs.
- Consulting-only or performance-only profiles. Strong candidates with just one half of the arc have been passed on repeatedly. The role needs both.
- People who are not yet playing with AI. Curiosity about AI is table stakes in this company.
Location, compensation and eligibility
- Location: New York City, Financial District. Five days a week in the office. The founders will consider flexibility only for a truly exceptional candidate, so please apply on the assumption that this is fully on-site. If you are relocating, you need to be able to do so quickly.
- Compensation: base salary of $180,000 to $250,000 depending on experience, plus meaningful early-stage equity that the founders describe as above market for the stage.
- Eligibility: US citizens and Green Card holders only. The company cannot sponsor or transfer visas for this role.
- Type: full-time, permanent. The company is hiring one to two people into this seat.
- Reports to: the co-founder and CEO.
- Timing: the role is urgent. The founders are interviewing now and want someone who is actively on the market and can start promptly.
Interview process
The process is fast and the founders are known for quick, clear feedback.
- Screen with us. A short conversation to confirm the arc, the hands-on depth and the logistics.
- Founder conversation. A deeper discussion with one of the co-founders about your consulting and performance-marketing experience and how you think about paid media.
- Ad-analysis exercise. A take-home that mirrors the real work: you get account data, you audit it, you present what you found and what you would do.
- Paid in-office work trial. A day or so in the New York office working on real customer problems with the team. This is paid.
- Offer.
Stages can flex depending on your profile and how the early conversations go.
How to apply
Big Wave Digital is running this search exclusively for the client. Send your resume to keiran@bigwavedigital.com.au with a few lines covering:
- where you consulted and for how long, and the consumer or adtech startup where you then ran paid media hands-on;
- the ad platforms you have personally managed and roughly the monthly spend you were responsible for;
- one or two concrete things you have built or automated with AI tools;
- confirmation that you can work five days a week in Manhattan and your current US work authorisation.
Every application is read by a person. If the arc fits, you will hear from us within two business days.
