Founding Account Executive, Lifecycle Studio

Hightouch; United States; Remote; USD 200,000 - 335,000; Full time

Job summary

Hightouch is seeking a Lifecycle Studio Specialist to lead lifecycle opportunities end-to-end. You will serve as the domain authority for AEs, guiding discovery, technical validation, demos, evaluations, and executive sessions across marketing automation platforms.

You’ll articulate migration paths, assess data mapping, and shape deliverability and template workflows. Strong ESP experience and SQL chops are essential to succeed.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in pre-sales, solutions consulting, lifecycle/CRM strategy, or marketing operations.
• Experience across multiple ESPs and strong data stack understanding.
• Ability to translate marketer needs into lifecycle program requirements.

Responsibilities

• Own lifecycle opportunities from discovery through executive sessions.
• Frame credible migration paths and demonstrate measurable outcomes.
• Coordinate with sales, product, and engineering to validate feasibility.

Skills

Pre-sales

Lifecycle strategy

ESP platforms

SQL knowledge

Discovery skills

Multi-ESP experience

Job description

Lifecycle Studio Specialist

Team

Sales

Location

Remote (North America)

Compensation

Enterprise: On-Target Earnings $300K – $335K Offers Equity

Mid-Market: On-Target Earnings $200K – $250K Offers Equity

About Hightouch

Hightouch is an Agentic Marketing Platform powered by the industry-leading Composable CDP. With complete brand context, customer data, and performance history in one place, every marketer finally has the power to build and ship end-to-end campaigns themselves. Teams move faster, stay on brand, and get AI marketing that actually works.

Founded in 2019 and headquartered in San Francisco, Hightouch enables marketing teams to analyze performance, brainstorm ideas, and generate creative at a speed and quality that wasn’t previously possible.

Named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Customer Data Platforms, Hightouch is trusted by leading enterprises like Domino’s, Spotify, Aritzia, Cars.com, Ramp, and PetSmart.

At Hightouch, our mission is to help our customers leverage data and AI to grow their businesses. The team is ambitious, impact-driven, efficient — and we believe humility, kindness, and compassion are essential to our success. If you’re energized by velocity, obsessed with raising the bar, and want to build alongside people who care deeply about each other and our customers, we’d love to meet you.

About The Role

Marketers are stuck. Their ESP was bought in 2017, the data model doesn’t match how the business actually segments, and every new campaign means a ticket to a data team that’s already underwater. Hightouch is building the AI-native alternative: audiences, journeys, and content generated on top of the warehouse instead of a copy of it. The technology works. What decides these deals is whether the person in the room has lived the marketer’s week, can look at a prospect’s SFMC or Iterable setup and say exactly what gets easier, and can make migration feel like a plan instead of a cliff.

That’s this role. You’ll be the domain authority our AEs bring into every lifecycle opportunity, across discovery, technical validation, demos, evaluations, and executive sessions. You’ll run discovery that goes past feature checklists and into the real workflow: how audiences get built, who produces templates, where data mapping breaks, how long a campaign really takes. Then you’ll turn that pain into outcomes an executive will fund. You’ll frame a credible high-level migration path early, so “we’d have to move off Salesforce Marketing Cloud” stops stalling deals. You’ll judge generated email and SMS the way a brand marketer would, set honest expectations about what AI-native execution changes, and pull in deliverability, data engineering, or partner resources when a question goes past your depth.

We’re hiring at Senior or Principal level, depending on depth. At Principal, you’ll set the lifecycle playbook for the GTM org: how we position against incumbents, what we build next, and how the rest of the team gets good at this. Prior Hightouch or CDP experience isn’t required, because the lifecycle depth is the harder thing to teach. Expect a working session rather than a quiz. You’ll walk us through a lifecycle setup you’ve inherited or rebuilt, run discovery on a realistic scenario, and give an honest read on generated creative.

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years in pre-sales, solutions consulting, lifecycle/CRM strategy, or marketing operations, including hands-on time running or architecting lifecycle programs, not only selling into them
• Real working experience across multiple ESPs (SFMC, Iterable, Cordial, Braze, Klaviyo, Attentive, or similar). We value depth in one and fluency in several more than certification in a single platform
• Fluency with the modern stack: how ESPs, CDPs, personalization engines, and the warehouse connect, including where identity, consent, and data freshness live and what breaks when they don’t
• Command of the craft: journeys vs. campaigns, channel strategy, and deliverability fundamentals, plus the brand judgment to know whether generated content would survive a brand review
• Discovery skills that surface process pain and turn it into a business case, proven in competitive, multi-vendor evaluations
• Bonus points if you’ve lived through an ESP migration, defended a platform decision to a CMO, CFO, or security review, are comfortable with SQL, or have a strong point of view on where lifecycle marketing is going