Creative Strategies Lead (Tech UGC)

Talent Runway; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work

Market-leading compensation

Direct access to founder

Job summary

Talent Runway is hiring a UGC Engineer Pod Lead to own a team of 3–5 UGC Engineers and the campaigns they run. You will shape content strategy, manage client relationships, and ensure high-quality execution across the pod.

This is a senior, hands-on leadership role requiring exceptional judgment of short-form content and the ability to elevate teammates. You’ll work directly with the founder and senior leadership, with market-leading compensation and substantial autonomy.

Qualifications

• Experience with short-form UGC (TikTok, Reels, Shorts) and ability to judge content quality.
• Proven ability to manage senior client relationships and communications.
• Strong leadership, coaching and team-building experience.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the UGC content strategy for the pod.
• Own client satisfaction and campaign health with founders and senior teams.
• Lead and develop 3–5 UGC engineers; provide direct feedback and remove performance issues.

Skills

UGC content judgment

Client management

Operational leadership

Ownership

Job description

We're hiring a UGC Engineer Pod Lead to own a team of 3–5 UGC Engineers and the campaigns they run.

Your job is to make your pod exceptional: outstanding content strategy, delighted clients, excellent creator management, and consistently brilliant execution.

You'll own the quality and outcomes of everything your team produces. You'll develop your engineers, identify winning creative strategies, build excellent client relationships, and make sure that nothing falls through the cracks.

This is a senior leadership role, but it's not hands-off management. You need to genuinely understand great short-form content, be comfortable getting directly involved, and be capable of making the people around you significantly better.

We're looking for an unusual person, and we're offering an unusual opportunity in return.

We're asking for extraordinary commitment: extreme ownership of outcomes, exceptionally high personal standards, and the intensity to sustain 65+ hour weeks in a demanding, fast-growing business.

In return, we're offering market-leading compensation with meaningful performance upside, enormous autonomy, direct access to the founder and senior leadership, and the opportunity to build and lead a major part of an exceptionally fast-growing company.

You’ll work with some of the biggest brands in tech, learn alongside exceptionally talented people, and have the opportunity to develop into a senior leader running delivery across multiple pods.

We’ll invest heavily in your development, give you real responsibility, and trust you to make important decisions. We expect an equally extraordinary level of commitment in return.

What You'll Own

• UGC content strategy: Set an exceptional creative bar across your pod. Review hooks, formats, scripts and creator output, challenge weak ideas, identify winning strategies and ensure your engineers are constantly testing, learning and improving.
• Client relationships: Own client satisfaction and campaign health. Build excellent relationships with founders and senior marketing teams, handle difficult conversations, and proactively address concerns before they become problems.
• People leadership: Manage, coach and develop your UGC Engineers. Set high expectations, give direct feedback, address underperformance, and build a team capable of producing outstanding work independently.
• Operational excellence: Know exactly what's happening across your campaigns. Ensure client requests are executed, deadlines are met, reports are accurate, and problems are resolved. Don't just assign tasks or accept assurances, verify that excellent work actually happens.
• Creator and campaign escalations: Step in when creators underperform, campaigns drift or engineers need support. Make difficult decisions, solve problems quickly and take responsibility for the outcome.
• Building the organisation: Improve systems, processes and standards as we scale. You'll have real autonomy to shape how your pod operates, with the opportunity to influence the wider agency.

Who Thrives Here

We think exceptional Pod Leads combine four qualities:

• Exceptional UGC content judgment. You understand what makes short-form content perform: hooks, formats, audience psychology, creative iteration and platform trends. You have excellent creative taste and love finding new ways to make content go viral.
• Excellent client management. You're a brilliant communicator who can confidently manage senior relationships, navigate difficult conversations and make clients feel they're in exceptionally capable hands.
• Superb operational and people leadership. You're organised, decisive and exceptional at getting things done through other people. You can manage complexity, develop talent, hold high standards and build systems that consistently produce excellent outcomes.
• Extreme ownership and engine. You're intensely ambitious, extraordinarily hardworking and deeply uncomfortable with mediocre work. You proactively find problems, take personal responsibility for fixing them, and don't stop at having tried, you care about actually delivering the result.

Requirements

• Experience and strong understanding of short-form UGC (Canvas UGC), particularly TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts
• Excellent client-facing communication and relationship management
• Demonstrated experience managing, coaching or developing people
• A track record of exceptional operational execution and independent ownership
• Strong analytical judgment and the ability to turn performance data into better content
• Exceptional written and spoken English

Additional Information

• Full-time, remote
• Reporting directly to the founder
• Market-leading compensation and performance-linked upside
• Significant ownership, autonomy and opportunities for professional development
• Clear progression towards leading delivery across multiple pods