User Acquisition Manager (Performance)

Growth at Recraft is a numbers problem before it's a brand problem. We're looking for a UA Manager who owns paid acquisition end to end: setting up the channels, scaling spend without breaking payback, and knowing which lever moved the number. This is a hands-in-the-accounts role, not an agency-management one — and for the right person, a chance to build the performance marketing engine at Recraft from scratch and scale it toward $1M/month.

One thing to know about the model, because it shapes the job: we don't run a free trial. New users get a pack of free credits, and once they need more, the only way forward is a paid subscription. That means conversion often happens on day one, and the numbers that matter are free-to-paid conversion rate, renewal, and payback by cohort — not trial starts.

Key Responsibilities

• Own paid user acquisition on Meta first — account structure, targeting, bidding, budget pacing, and daily optimization. Meta is where the majority of the budget sits and where we expect the majority of your time to go.

• Open and scale the next channels as Meta matures: Google (Search, PMax, YouTube, App) and TikTok.

• Scale monthly spend aggressively while holding CAC, ROAS, and cohort payback targets. Growth without payback discipline doesn't count.

• Build what isn't there yet: tracking, attribution, naming conventions, dashboards, and reporting — so decisions are made on data everyone trusts.

• Own subscription economics, not vanity metrics: free-to-paid conversion, day-one subscription rate, renewal and churn by month, ARPPU, and LTV by cohort and by channel.

• Run a structured testing cadence on audiences, placements, bidding, and offers — and brief creative based on what the data says, working directly with our Creative Designer.

• Automate the repetitive parts of the job — reporting, pacing, anomaly alerts, creative rotation — using Claude and platform APIs, so your time goes to decisions rather than spreadsheets.

• Forecast and plan budget, and report weekly on spend, CAC, and payback to marketing and leadership.

Who You'll Work With

You'll join the Marketing team and work closely with our Performance Marketing Manager, Creative Designer, and the analytics and product teams. This is a role built around owning a number and bringing your own plan for hitting it, not executing someone else's media plan.

Requirements

• 4+ years in user acquisition or performance marketing for a consumer subscription product — app, web, or both.

• Deep, hands-on Meta expertise. You've run Meta as a primary acquisition channel at meaningful spend, built the account structure yourself, and can explain how you handled the moments where scaling stopped working.

• You've managed a paid budget of at least $100k/month and can walk us through what CAC and payback did as you scaled it.

• Experience setting up performance marketing from scratch — accounts, pixels and server-side events, MMP/SKAN or GA4, attribution logic, and reporting.

• Fluency in subscription economics: free-to-paid conversion, renewal and churn, ARPPU, LTV:CAC, and cohort payback. Comfortable pulling your own numbers in a BI tool, with basic SQL.

• Comfortable using AI in your daily workflow — analysis, reporting, and automation — rather than treating it as a side experiment.

• Based in the EU, Georgia, Armenia, or Serbia, with the right to work as a contractor there.

Nice to Have

• A track record of scaling paid spend to around $1M/month. This is a significant plus and would move a candidate to the top of the list. We know it's rare, which is why it sits here rather than in requirements.

• Experience with a credit, token, or usage-based subscription — a model where conversion is driven by hitting a limit rather than by a trial expiring.

• Hands-on experience beyond Meta — Google (Search, PMax, YouTube, App), TikTok, or Apple Search Ads. Strength in a second channel counts for a lot; all of them is not something we expect.

• Experience in the photo, video, or creative-tools segment (Canva, Picsart, Photoroom, VSCO, CapCut-adjacent products) — or another consumer subscription category with hard payback math, such as fitness, health, or education.

• Real experience using Claude or other LLMs to manage and automate performance campaigns: bulk edits, budget pacing scripts, automated creative and cohort reporting.

• Both web and app funnel experience, including web-to-app flows and web paywalls (Stripe, Paddle, or similar).

• Incrementality testing, geo-lift — anything that shows you're skeptical of platform-reported numbers.

• Ad copywriting — able to write your own hooks and headlines instead of waiting on a brief.

• In-house experience at a product company rather than purely agency-side work.

• You're already a Recraft user.

What We Offer

• A full-time contractor engagement, fully remote, with compensation that matches the seniority and ownership this role carries.

• Real ownership of the acquisition budget and the targets attached to it — you set the plan, you spend the money, you own the result.

• A product built on AI image and video generation, growing fast, where your work has a direct, measurable line to company revenue.

• The chance to define what performance marketing looks like at Recraft — the structure and playbook you build is what everyone after you works from.

• An environment where automating your own job with AI is encouraged, not viewed with suspicion.

• Direct collaboration with our Performance Marketing, Creative, analytics, and product teams.

• A team that means it when it says it wants to build the best product in the category — people who give each other direct, useful feedback, share context openly, and step in to help without being asked.