Sr. Performance Marketing Manager, Growth Systems

Building the Future of Open Finance

Payward - the parent company behind Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services and CF Benchmarks - has spent the last 15 years building one of the most modern and globally accessible financial infrastructure platforms in the industry, built to advance an open, global financial system.

Before you apply, we encourage you to explore our culture page to understand what drives us and how we work.

The team

Founded in 2011, Kraken is one of the world's longest-standing crypto platforms, trusted by over 10 million individuals and institutions across the globe. It offers spot trading, margin, futures, staking, and OTC services, with products built for both individual investors and institutional clients.

Performance marketing at Kraken is being rebuilt from the ground up. Manual bid management, creative iteration, budget allocation, and audience targeting are being replaced by agent systems that detect signals, make decisions, and execute continuously, learning from every result.

As Sr. Performance Marketing Manager, Growth Systems, you bring deep paid growth expertise and apply it to the systems replacing manual execution. Your job is to define the logic: what signals matter, what decisions should be automated, what guardrails must exist, and what the creative feedback loop looks like across paid channels. The engineers build what you spec. The agents run what you design.

While your primary focus is performance and paid growth, you will also contribute to automating other growth levers, including CRO, incentives, referrals, and cross-channel workflows, as the engine expands. The domain expertise is your anchor. The systems thinking is what scales it.

This role is for someone who has run growth at scale and found themselves constantly asking why are we doing this manually. If you've felt the ceiling of what human-operated paid growth can achieve and want to build the system that breaks through it, this is that role.

The opportunity

• Refine creative and copy variants generated by the AI creative layer, applying domain judgment to what will perform before the data confirms it

• QA agent outputs, review what the system produces, identify where it falls short, and define the corrections that improve it

• Monitor workflow performance and continuously improve, this system compounds with your input, it does not run itself

• Define and spec automation workflows for paid growth, from creative fatigue detection to budget reallocation to geo level channel mix optimization to audience signal processing

• Work directly with the build team to translate your workflow specs into working agent automations

• Define knowledge base inputs for the paid growth agents, what rules, guardrails, and campaign logic should be codified and kept current

• Extend your systems thinking to other growth levers, CRO, incentives, referrals, and lifecycle, as the engine expands across growth functions

What you bring

• 8+ years in performance or paid growth, you have run campaigns at scale across major paid channels and understand the mechanics deeply

• Deep expertise across core paid channels (Meta, Google/YouTube, TikTok, Apple Search Ads, programmatic/DSPs) rather than just "major paid channels" generically

• Comfort with data, you can read a performance dashboard, interpret signal from noise, and define what an agent should optimize for

• Strong written communication, the workflow specs you write become the blueprints engineers build from. Clarity matters.

• Systems thinking, you can map a growth workflow as a series of triggers, decisions, actions, and measurements. You think in logic, not just tactics

• Prompt engineering curiosity, you don't need to be an engineer, but you are willing to learn how to communicate with AI systems precisely and improve their outputs

• High agency, you define the work, you don't wait for it to be defined for you

Nice to haves

• Experience with marketing automation, CRM, or lifecycle messaging systems

• Exposure to A/B testing and experimentation frameworks

• Background in fintech, consumer financial products, or regulated industries

• Any hands-on experience with workflow automation or no-code orchestration tools

Unless a specific application deadline is stated in the job posting, applications are accepted on an ongoing basis.

Please note, applicants are permitted to redact or remove information on their resume that identifies age, date of birth, or dates of attendance at or graduation from an educational institution.

We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories for employment on our team, assessing candidates in a manner consistent with the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

Our commitment

Payward is powered by people from around the world and we celebrate the diverse talents, backgrounds, contributions, and unique perspectives that everyone brings to the table. We hire based on merit, seeking out people with the right abilities, knowledge, and skills for the job. We encourage you to apply for roles where you don't fully meet the listed requirements, especially if you're passionate or knowledgeable about crypto.

We may ask candidates to complete job-related skills or work-style assessments as part of our hiring process. These assessments evaluate competencies relevant to the role and are applied consistently across candidates for similar positions. Results are considered alongside experience and interviews, and are not the sole basis for any employment decision.

As an equal opportunity employer, we don't tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind, whether based on race, ethnicity, age, gender identity, citizenship, religion, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state, or local laws.

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