Founding Growth Lead - Paid Acquisition

Ralo; New York (NY); On-site; USD 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Top-tier team

Low bureaucracy

Growth-focused culture

Job summary

Ralo, a NYC-based mortgage tech startup, seeks a founding growth lead to own paid channels end-to-end. You will craft channel strategy, build the funnel, and run end-to-end measurement with real budget responsibility. This is a hands-on role with direct impact on CAC, ROAS, and loan economics.

You’ll work in a fast-paced early-stage environment, shipping rapidly, and owning the growth engine with minimal existing teams. Intel from founders and high-quality mentors will back your decisions.

Qualifications

• 3–7 years in performance, growth, or paid acquisition marketing
• Hands-on fluency with major ad platforms and analytics
• Technical comfort to build your own funnel and own measurement
• Strong copywriting instincts for performance creative and AI-enabled scaling
• Real accountability to CAC, ROAS, payback, and defend it

Responsibilities

• Define channel strategy and execution across paid channels
• Own the full funnel from click to funded-loan economics
• Set up and own conversion tracking and attribution
• Build and maintain operational dashboards for key metrics
• Create and iterate ad creatives and landing pages using AI tools
• Own post-click conversion optimization and CRO efforts
• Budget management and forecasting with transparent rationale

Skills

Performance marketing

Paid acquisition

Funnel building

A/B testing

Analytics

Copywriting

Tools

Google Ads

Facebook Ads

LinkedIn Ads

Job description

About Ralo

The mortgage industry operates like it was built in the 1990s and is severely underprepared for the AI-era. We're rebuilding the entire mortgage stack from the ground up for the future.

Ralo was founded in 2025 by Arjun Lalwani (CEO) and Helly Shah (CTO), after we went through the mortgage process themselves and found it broken. We got licensed as loan officers and automated the work from the inside.

Early signals are strong: $50K+ in average lifetime savings per customer, closings 3x faster than industry average (15 days instead of the typical 30-45), and an NPS above 90.

We've built the product and proven that customers love it. Now we're looking for the person who can help us turn it into a breakout consumer company.

We've raised a $2.9M seed from Y Combinator, Manresa Ventures, Pack Ventures, and Pioneer Fund, with angels including Ryan Frazier (CEO of Arrived), Aaron King (CEO of Snapdocs), and Charles Ferguson (director of Inside Job).

The role

You'll be our founding growth lead, 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 marketing channels, the creative tests, the landing pages, the tracking, and the honest read on what every dollar returns. Design and engineering are here to support you when needed, 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, an engineering team, and an analytics team handling everything, this will be a hard role.

What you’ll own

• Channel strategy and execution across paid search, paid social, UGC, and other paid channels. You will figure out 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 on key metrics (CAC, ROAS, CPL, conversion) 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 you'll need

• 3-7 years in performance, growth, or paid acquisition marketing, with a track record of scaling spend profitably and scrappily testing
• Hands-on fluency across the major ad platforms, plus the analytics and experiment design to know what's actually working.
• The technical comfort to build your own funnel (creatives, landing pages) and own your own measurement (setting up conversion tracking, working with 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 ($130k - $180k 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.