Head of Managed Channels

Groupon, Inc.; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Groupon is seeking a senior creative leader to own the creative and content of all owned messaging across email, push, web push, SMS, RCS, WhatsApp and in-app inbox. You will define the voice, set the bar for quality, and build an AI-powered studio that turns concepts into on-brand outputs at scale.

You will lead a cross-functional team, work with the CDP/Bloomreach and CRM Lifecycle squads, and own the channel P&L, deliverability, and compliance while driving revenue and repeat purchase across

Qualifications

• Lead owned CRM channels across multiple markets.
• Build an AI-powered studio for on-brand creative output.
• Define guardrails and brand voice for all messages.
• Own cross-channel P&L, deliverability and compliance.
• Experience with multi-country e-commerce and growth.

Responsibilities

• Own the creative and content of every message Groupon sends across channels.
• Develop an AI-driven production and QA workflow for scalable output.
• Run always-on testing across concept, copy, design, offer and timing.
• Set a unified messaging strategy and prove it with holdouts.
• Lead and grow the Managed Channels team and operating cadence.

Skills

Creative leadership

CRM at scale

AI in creative

Brand guardrails

Data & analytics

SQL

Tools

Bloomreach

Braze

Iterable

Salesforce MC

Job description

Groupon connects 42 million customers with local experiences - restaurants, events, wellness and travel - and the million-plus merchants who deliver them. Our mission is to get people offline and into the real world at prices that make it possible. We're an AI-native company in the middle of a platform transformation, moving from a deals marketplace to an experience discovery platform that works for customers and merchants at the same time.

Few companies on earth have sent more emails than Groupon. For fifteen years the daily deal email was the business — it built one of the largest owned audiences in e-commerce and taught a generation of marketers what a send could do. That audience is still here, and it now hears from us across email, push, web push, SMS, RCS, WhatsApp and the in-app inbox. The machinery behind it has been rebuilt: Bloomreach runs as CDP and intent engine, messaging vendors are consolidated, and most of the sending, targeting and reporting is already automated. What is not solved is the part that matters most: what the customer actually sees. Our messages are still built around the deal, not the customer — the creative, the copy, the offer framing and the story we tell across channels have not kept pace with the machinery underneath them, and that is the ceiling on the whole portfolio. This role exists for a creative leader who knows what makes someone open, read and buy, and who wants to prove it at a scale almost no one gets to work at — using AI as their studio, so every idea can be designed, written, tested and read out in days rather than weeks.

WHO YOU'LL WORK WITH

You report to Josef Buryan, Chief Marketing Officer. You lead the Managed Channels team — a channel lead and a small group of specialists across email, push and messaging — and you are the business owner facing the Managed Channels engineering squad, the CDP/Bloomreach team, CRM Lifecycle, Pricing & Promotions and Data & Analytics. You will sit in the weekly business review and be asked, by name, what your channels did for revenue last week.

Honest filter: this is not a campaign-calendar job and it is not a platform-migration job — the plumbing is done. There is no agency, no studio, and no one who will hand you a brief or a brand book. You set the creative bar, you decide what the customer hears and how it looks, and you build the AI-assisted workflow that produces and tests it at volume. If you want a large creative team to direct and a settled roadmap to execute, this will be uncomfortable.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

• Owning the creative and content of every message Groupon sends — the concept, the copy, the design, the offer framing and the voice — across email, push, web push, SMS, RCS, WhatsApp and in-app inbox, and setting the bar for what "good" looks like in each.
• Owning the owned-and-operated channel P&L as one portfolio: revenue, incrementality, cost per send, deliverability and list health, not opens and clicks.
• Building an AI-powered studio around your creative judgment: generative systems that turn your concepts into on-brand creative, copy and layouts per segment and market, with automated QA and brand guardrails you define, so output is bounded by ideas rather than production hours.
• Turning creative testing into a system, not a calendar: always-on testing of concept, copy, design, offer, timing and channel, fast read-outs, and clear kill/scale decisions — so the portfolio learns what customers respond to every week.
• Setting one messaging strategy across channels — who hears from us, how often, on which channel, with what story — and proving it with holdouts rather than last-click attribution.
• Turning the CDP into money: taking Bloomreach affinity, intent and RFM signals and translating them into triggers, journeys and audiences that visibly move repeat purchase.
• Owning deliverability and compliance end to end: inbox placement, sender reputation, consent and unsubscribe handling across every market and channel, and the vendor relationships behind them.
• Leading and growing the team: a clear operating cadence, honest feedback, and a bar for creativity, curiosity and craft that attracts people who want to make things customers love.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

The stack is automated and the data is in place, so the ramp is short.

• Day 7: you have read the portfolio's numbers and every live template yourself, and can say what is wrong with our creative today, which channels are incremental, and what you will test first.
• Day 21: your first new creative concept is live in a real send with a holdout behind it, and you have a working AI-assisted production-and-QA workflow — built by you or with you, not specified for someone else.
• Day 45: the creative testing loop is running weekly across at least two channels; test volume has visibly stepped up, a first version of the brand guardrails is encoded, and the team is spending its time on ideas and read-outs rather than production.
• Day 60: a measurable move in a revenue or repeat-purchase metric you own, one cross-channel frequency rule in production with a holdout measuring it, and a clear point of view on where the next two quarters' bets should go.

WHAT THIS ROLE DEMANDS

• You are a creative leader first: you have set the creative and content direction for owned channels at a consumer brand, you can show us work you are proud of and explain why it performed, and you have run high-velocity creative testing programs where the losers taught you as much as the winners.
• You have owned owned-and-operated CRM channels at scale — millions of contactable profiles, multiple markets, several channels — and can show the revenue you moved and the holdout that proved it.
• You have used AI to produce real creative work in the last twelve months — copy, design, content pipelines — and can show us the output and what it replaced. In a practical task you will take a brief from concept to tested creative, using AI as your studio.
• You know what "on brand" means well enough to write it down as guardrails a system can follow, and you have the taste to know when the system got it wrong.
• You are fluent in a modern CDP or engagement platform (Bloomreach, Braze, Iterable, Salesforce MC or equivalent) deeply enough to design the data model and journeys, not just brief someone who does.
• You can read a raw table — SQL, a notebook, a BigQuery console — and form your own view before the analyst does.
• You have managed senior specialists and can point to people who grew under you.
• You are relentlessly curious: you can tell us what you have tested recently that failed, what you learned, and what you would try next.
• B2C marketplace or e-commerce background; multi-country experience is a strong plus.

HOW WE OPERATE

• Extreme Ownership: when a channel underperforms, when a send goes wrong, when the carrier blocks us — the fix has your name on it, not the vendor's or engineering's.
• Impact Obsessed: you drop anything that does not move revenue or repeat purchase, and you can always say which metric and by how much.
• Speed Over Comfort: you ship a creative test this week instead of a perfect campaign next month, and AI is how you get there.

Location: Madrid (preferred); Prague or London possible. Hybrid.

Groupon is an AI-First Company
We’re committed to building smarter, faster, and more innovative ways of working and AI plays a key role in how we get there. We encourage candidates toleverage AI tools during the hiring process where it adds value, and we’re always keen to hear how technology improves the way you work. If you’re passionate about AI or curious to explore how it can elevate your role you’ll be right at home here.
Groupon’s purpose is to build strong communities through thriving small businesses. To learn more about the world’s largest local e-commerce marketplace, click here . You can also find out more about us in the latest Groupon news as well as learning about our DEI approach . If all of this sounds like something that’s a great fit for you.