Consultant brain. Ads instincts. Founding seat.
Most people have one of these. A few have both. If you trained at McKinsey, BCG or Bain and then found yourself pulled toward advertising, whether that was working on Google, Meta, Amazon or TikTok ads, owning growth at a consumer brand or digging into how paid media actually drives revenue, this role was written for you.
A New York AI startup is building an agentic AI performance marketing platform for consumer brands. The founders are ex-Google, and the early team comes from Google, Apple and Amazon. They are hiring two Founding Deployment Strategists to sit between their product and their customers, and to help shape both.
Up to USD $250K base + founding equity + profit share. 5 days on-site, Financial District, Manhattan.
The rare combination we’re after
You need both halves:
1. Top-tier consulting. MBB is preferred. You’ve structured ambiguous problems, built the model, written the deck and stood in front of a C-suite to defend the recommendation.
2. Ads or ads-adjacent experience. You don’t need to have lived inside an ads manager every day, but advertising can’t be new to you. Strong examples include:
- Working on or with Google Ads, YouTube, Meta, Amazon Ads or TikTok Ads, in strategy, sales, product, partnerships or measurement
- Retail media or marketplace advertising (Amazon, Walmart Connect, Instacart and similar)
- Growth, acquisition or marketing strategy at a fast-growing consumer or DTC brand
- An adtech or martech company, or a consulting practice focused on marketing, growth and customer strategy
- Owning a paid media budget, an attribution model or a marketing mix analysis
- Hands-on campaign management is a big plus, but not essential
Pure consultants with no ads exposure, and pure media buyers with no consulting, won’t be the right fit. The magic is in the overlap.
What you’ll actually do
- Be the strategist in the room. Work directly with founders, CMOs and growth leads at consumer brands, advising them on how to spend smarter across Google, Meta, Amazon and TikTok.
- Read the account, find the story. Dig into ad account data, run audits, spot where money is being wasted and turn it into a clear plan a CEO can act on.
- Deploy the product. Get brands live on the platform, make sure the AI is doing the right things, and own outcomes from onboarding to measurable results.
- Shape what gets built. You’ll be one of the first people hearing what customers need. Bring it back to the founders and engineers and help decide what ships next.
- Build your own tools. This team likes people who use Claude Code, Codex and other AI tools to automate their own work. If you’ve built an agent, a dashboard or a workflow for fun, we want to hear about it.
You’ll thrive here if you
- Have 3 to 15 years of experience, starting in consulting and moving toward advertising, growth or marketing
- Can talk ROAS, CAC and incrementality with a performance team in the morning, then present to a board in the afternoon
- Love early-stage chaos and want founding-level ownership, not a narrow lane
- Tinker with AI because you’re curious, not because someone told you to
- Want to be in the office with the founders every day, building something from scratch
Nice to have: a STEM degree, a top-school background, time on a Google, Meta, Amazon or TikTok ads team, or hands-on campaign management at a high-growth consumer brand.
The package
- Up to USD $250,000 base
- Founding equity, a genuinely meaningful stake for an early hire
- Profit share
- 401(k), medical, dental and vision
- Relocation support to New York City
- 5 days on-site in the Financial District with the founding team
Why apply through Big Wave Digital
We are a specialist recruitment firm placing strategy, AI and growth talent with fast-moving US startups. We know this client, we know the brief, and we’ll make sure your story lands with the founders. Every application is read by a real person, and we’ll tell you honestly where you stand.
Ready? Apply with your resume and a short note covering two things: your consulting background, and your experience with ads or ads-adjacent work. If you’ve built something with AI, send the link.
