Founding Growth Lead - Paid Acquisition

Approval AI; New York (NY); On-site; USD 100,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Office in NYC

Job summary

Ralo is hiring its Performance Marketing Lead to own paid acquisition channels end-to-end from strategy to execution. You will build the engine for channel selection, tracking, creative tests, landing pages, and economic readouts in a fast-growing fintech mortgage environment.

In a founder-led setting, you’ll operate with real budget control and no prior marketing team in place. You will be accountable for CAC, ROAS, and conversion at every step, building dashboards and forecasting borrower

Qualifications

• 3–7 years in performance, growth, or paid acquisition marketing.

Responsibilities

• Own channel strategy and execution across paid search and paid social.
• Manage the full funnel from click to funded loan economics.

Skills

Performance marketing

Budget forecasting

Measurement & analytics

Copywriting

Ownership & accountability

Tools

Meta Ads

GA4 / analytics

Conversion APIs

Job description

Performance Marketing Lead at Ralo (P25)

$100K - $150K

AI-Native Mortgage Broker

New York, NY, US, Full-time, US citizen/visa only, 3+ years

About Ralo

Ralo is the first AI-native mortgage broker. We use AI to remove layers of overhead and pass the savings back to borrowers. Our customers get rates more than half a point below the national average, save tens of thousands of dollars over the life of their loan, and close in about 15 days instead of the typical 30–45. We’re backed by Y Combinator, Manresa Ventures, Pack Ventures, and others, with $2.9M raised to make mortgages actually affordable.

About the role

The role

You’ll be our first paid acquisition hire, and you’ll own the channels where we pay to reach borrowers (end to end). This is not a seat where you tune bids and hand everything else to a team. There is no team yet. You’ll build the engine: the channels, the tracking, the creative tests, the landing pages, and the honest read on what every dollar returns. Design and engineering are here to support you on polished creative and landing pages, and you’ll be trusted with a real budget to make the right calls yourself.

If you came up at an early‑stage startup and like owning a number without a support cast around you, you’ll feel at home. If you’re used to a creative team, a web team, and an analytics team handling everything but the platform UI, this will be a hard role.

What you’ll own

• Channel strategy and execution across paid search, paid social: what we run, who we target, how budget splits, and what gets scaled or killed.
• The full funnel, not the click. You own the paid acquisition funnel through to funded‑loan loan economics: click‑through, lead, qualified lead, and the conversion rate at every step in between.
• Measurement and attribution. Stand up and own our conversion tracking, event tracking, and UTM discipline across creative, landing pages, CRM, site, and funded loans.
• Operational dashboards. Build and maintain the day‑to‑day reporting — CAC, ROAS, CPL, conversion, spend pacing — that the team and founders run on.
• Creative and landing pages at velocity. Use LLMs and generative tools to produce, test, and refine ad creative and scrappy landing pages yourself, fast, before handing the winners to design and eng to polish.
• Conversion. Own the post‑click experience for the traffic you’re paying for: what each page says, the variants to test, and the CRO work to lift conversion.
• Budget and forecasting. You’ll manage real spend, pace it, and forecast how many borrowers a given budget should produce and explain it when the numbers move.

What the role is (and isn’t)

• In scope: paid channels, the tracking beneath them, operational dashboards, test creative, paid landing pages, and the conversion math through to a funded loan.
• Shared: creatives (you direct and produce a scrappy first cut; our designer polishes); landing pages (your strategy and CRO; engineering builds).
• Not your job: following up with leads, the sales conversation, owning brand voice, PR, and the mortgage process itself.

What you’ll need

• 3-7 years in performance, growth, or paid acquisition marketing, with a track record of scaling spend profitably
• Hands‑on fluency across the major ad platforms (especially Meta), plus the analytics and experiment design to know what’s actually working.
• The technical comfort to own your own measurement: setting up and validating conversion tracking, working with the platforms’ conversion APIs, querying data yourself, and stitching it across funnels.
• Strong copywriting instincts and taste in performance creative — and the ability to scale that taste with AI.
• Real accountability to a number, CAC, ROAS, payback, and the rigor to defend it.
• An early‑stage operator’s instinct: you ship, move fast, take ownership, and find a way through ambiguity. You solve problems yourself when you can, and when you can’t, you find the person, tool, or workaround that gets it done.

This is an in‑person role at our New York City office (Flatiron).

Nice to have

• Background in fintech, mortgage, real estate, or another high‑consideration, regulated category.
• Experience as the first or earliest marketing hire somewhere.
• Genuinely bought into Ralo’s mission to make mortgages affordable.

What we offer

• A competitive compensation package ($100k - $150k base) with meaningful early‑employee equity
• A top‑tier team to build with, including people from Y Combinator, Google, and Goldman Sachs
• A low‑bureaucracy environment: minimal meetings, maximum ownership.
• A high bar focused on execution, learning, and continuous improvement.