Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.
Doc Brown, Back to the Future
Oliver Wyman, L.E.K., Kearney, Roland Berger, Strategy&, Monitor Deloitte or EY-Parthenon? Moved into digital ads? This founding role wants both.
You don’t need a McKinsey, BCG or Bain badge for this one. If you trained at a top strategy firm and then got your hands dirty in performance marketing, our client wants to talk to you.
Our client is a well-funded, seed-stage, AI-first startup in New York building an agentic performance marketing platform for consumer brands. Its AI agents run paid campaigns end to end across Google, Meta, Amazon, TikTok and more: research, creative, media buying and around-the-clock optimisation. The founders are ex-Google. One launched an AI ads product inside Google and grew it from zero to more than $500M in revenue a year; the other put production AI live at Google Research. High-growth consumer brands are already paying customers.
They now need their first customer-facing strategist: someone who can run a CMO meeting like a consulting engagement manager and audit an ad account like a performance marketer.
Up to $250K base + founding equity. 5 days a week on-site, Financial District, Manhattan.
Tier 1.5 firms we’d love to hear from
- Oliver Wyman
- L.E.K. Consulting
- Kearney
- Roland Berger
- Strategy& (PwC)
- Monitor Deloitte
- EY-Parthenon
- Simon-Kucher (especially pricing, growth and commercial work)
- ZS Associates (especially marketing analytics and commercial strategy)
- Prophet (especially brand, marketing and growth strategy)
McKinsey, BCG and Bain alumni are of course welcome too.
What you’ll do
- Own a portfolio of consumer brand accounts and become their trusted adviser on paid media
- Present performance to CMOs, CEOs and CFOs, turning complex ad data into clear decisions
- Dig into Google, Meta and Amazon ad accounts: audit them, find wasted spend and spot growth opportunities
- Explain what the AI agents are doing and why, and feed what you learn from customers back into the product
- Build the deployment function from scratch, with a clear path to hiring and leading a team
What you’ll bring
- Top-tier strategy consulting experience at one of the Tier 1.5 firms above (or MBB), where you learned to structure problems, build the numbers and win over senior executives
- Digital ads experience after consulting: performance marketing, paid media, growth or ads-adjacent work, ideally at a high-growth consumer brand, an e-commerce business, an adtech company or the ads side of a major platform
- Comfort with the metrics: ROAS, CPA, CAC, LTV and incrementality, and the judgment to know what to do when the numbers move
- Hands-on ad account skills in Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager or Amazon Ads are a big plus
- You build with AI: you tinker with tools like Claude Code, Codex or ChatGPT to automate your own work, and you’re excited to work alongside AI agents every day
- A STEM degree and/or a top school
The package
- Up to $250K base
- Founding equity as one of the first hires
- 401(k), medical, dental and vision
- 5 days a week on-site in the Financial District, Manhattan, with a small, sharp team. Relocation to New York is welcome.
- US work authorization required; visa transfers considered for exceptional candidates
Why this role
- A genuine founding seat: you’ll shape how an AI-first company works with its customers
- Learn from founders who built a $500M+ a year ads product inside Google
- Paying customers, serious funding and a product that’s already working
- Your consulting toolkit and your ads experience, finally in one role
Tier 1.5 consulting plus digital ads is a rare combination. If you have it, apply now. If you know someone who does, send this their way.
