Lifecycle Marketer

Job Description

Job Description

AI is the new electricity, transforming every aspect of our lives. DeepLearning.AI is on a mission to empower everyone to build with AI. We offer world-class education, hands-on training, access to AI news, a collaborative community and global in-person conferences.

We are looking for a Lifecycle Marketing Manager to own the full journey a user takes from first sign-up to loyal paying subscriber. This role starts with a clear, urgent mandate: reduce churn and improve our free-to-paid conversion rate. You will own the strategy, automation, and measurement behind improving conversion of free users to our Pro offering, then expand upward into onboarding, nurture, and re-engagement as the foundation is built.

This is one of the highest-leverage hires on the marketing team right now. You will work closely with Growth, Product Marketing, and Marketing Engineering to instrument, automate, and continuously improve the parts of the funnel that convert interest into revenue. You will report to the Head of Marketing and collaborate daily with Engineering and Data on instrumentation and measurement.

What You'll Do

Churn & Retention

• Own the win-back and re-engagement strategy for lapsed free users and at-risk paid subscribers

• Diagnose the drivers of our current subscriber plateau using Stripe, PostHog, and CRM data, and build the first corrective campaigns within 30 days

• Design and ship lifecycle flows that recover users who abandon checkout which is currently our single largest funnel drop-off at roughly 80%

• Build a recurring churn cohort analysis and present findings to marketing and product leadership monthly

Trial & Conversion

• Own the trial-to-paid journey end to end including timing, messaging, and incentive structure for every touchpoint between sign-up and subscription

• Partner with Product Marketing to align in-platform messaging with lifecycle email and notification sequences

• Run structured A/B tests on trial length, onboarding sequencing, and conversion offers, and scale what works

• Build segmentation logic across our CRM contacts so every message reflects where a person actually is in their journey whether free, trial, lapsed, or paid

Email & CRM Strategy

• Set the strategic roadmap for all lifecycle and nurture email, partnering with the Marketing Operations Coordinator who owns execution and tooling

• Define the audience segments, triggers, and journey logic inside our CRM platform (Customer.io)

• Own subject line, send time, and frequency strategy across the lifecycle calendar, balancing conversion goals against list fatigue and unsubscribe risk

• Partner with Editorial on how The Batch and other newsletters feed into lifecycle journeys rather than existing as a disconnected channel

Measurement & Reporting

• Own lifecycle KPIs including free-to-paid conversion rate, checkout completion rate, 30/60/90-day retention, and churn rate. Report on them with a consistent cadence

• Build the LTV and cohort retention views our current dashboard is missing, partnering with Data Engineering on the underlying instrumentation

• Translate lifecycle performance into a clear narrative for leadership: what's improving, what isn't, and what you're doing about it

What You Bring

Required

• 3–6 years of experience in lifecycle, CRM, or retention marketing, with direct ownership of conversion or churn metrics, 

• Experience in subscription, edtech, or freemium-to-paid business models

• Hands-on experience with a marketing automation or CRM platform (Customer.io, Braze, Iterable, HubSpot, or similar)

• Demonstrated ability to read funnel and behavioral data (PostHog, Amplitude, Mixpanel, or similar) and translate it into a campaign strategy

• Experience designing and analyzing A/B tests with a clear hypothesis, control, and success metric

• Comfort working with subscription billing data (Stripe or similar) to understand the relationship between marketing activity and revenue

• Strong, clear writing, you will write or closely direct the copy for every lifecycle touchpoint

• A bias toward diagnosis before action, you investigate root cause before shipping a fix

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with the AI/ML or technical education landscape

• Experience partnering with engineering on event tracking and instrumentation

• Working knowledge of SQL for self-serve data exploration

• Experience with checkout or payment flow optimization specifically

What Success Looks Like

In your first 30 days, you will have audited the current lifecycle and CRM setup, diagnosed the leading drivers behind our checkout abandonment and subscriber plateau, and identified the two or three highest-leverage fixes. Within 30 days, you will have shipped your first churn and win-back campaigns, established a recurring reporting cadence, and have early data showing directional improvement in free-to-paid conversion. In 6 months, you will have measurably improved retention and conversion, built a durable lifecycle infrastructure with the Marketing Engineer and Marketing Operations Coordinator, and become the team's authority on what drives a user from sign-up to loyal subscriber.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.