Growth - Lifecycle Lead

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a Lifecycle Lead to build the company-wide owned-channel capability, partnering with Engineering to deploy an orchestration platform and define scalable workflows that support evergreen programs across onboarding, activation, retention, and monetization.

You will work across product, data science, analytics, and PMM to design journeys, templates, and measurements, ensuring high deliverability, localization, and operational quality while guiding senior stakeholders.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in lifecycle, CRM, retention, growth, product marketing, or marketing technology, ideally in a global consumer or subscription business.
• A track record of building and scaling lifecycle tooling or platforms with Engineering for multiple teams, products, audiences, or markets.
• Strong technical and product fluency across event and identity models, data pipelines, APIs, segmentation, triggering, decisioning, experimentation, and deployment systems; coding experience is not required.
• Deep campaign and journey craft, with experience designing evergreen programs that move users from message to product value and durable behavior.
• Strong experimentation and measurement judgment, including incrementality, holdouts, cohort quality, retention, and lifetime value—not just delivery or click metrics.
• Experience creating operating models, governance, templates, and quality standards that increase organizational velocity without creating channel chaos.
• Executive-level cross-functional influence and clear communication across Engineering, Product, Data Science, Analytics, PMM, Creative, Legal, Privacy, and regional teams.
• A hands-on, systems-oriented leadership style: you can set a multi-year direction, write the brief, inspect the journey, diagnose failures, and make pragmatic tradeoffs in a fast-moving environment.

Responsibilities

• Partner with product to set the company-wide vision, roadmap, and operating model for lifecycle and owned-channel engagement.
• Partner with Engineering, Product, Data Science, and Analytics to shape the tooling and infrastructure for identity, audiences, eligibility, consent, triggers, orchestration, decisioning, frequency, experimentation, localization, quality assurance, and observability.
• Define scalable deployment workflows—including self-service and centrally supported paths, intake, templates, approvals, governance, service levels, and incident response—so teams across the company can launch safely and efficiently.
• Partner with Product Marketing Managers and other client teams to translate audience, product, and business goals into evergreen journey strategies across onboarding, activation, continuation, retention, resurrection, and monetization.
• Lead the design, launch, iteration, and optimization of templates and journeys across email, push, and in-product messaging, including the deep-linked landing and post-click product experiences that complete the loop.
• Partner with Growth DS to build a measurement system that connects reach, eligibility, delivery, engagement, landing behavior, task completion, retained activity, and incremental value through sound experiments and holdouts.
• Optimize the lifecycle portfolio—not just individual sends—by improving inventory, relevance, personalization, prioritization, and per-user frequency.
• Inform our owned channel / upsell strategy–establish a high bar for deliverability, user preferences, localization, and operational quality, and trust while influencing senior stakeholders across the company.

Skills

Lifecycle marketing

CRM systems

Customer journeys

Experimentation

Cross-functional collaboration

Job description

About the Team

The Growth team drives user and revenue growth across ChatGPT’s consumer and business segments as well as other OpenAI products worldwide. We operate across the full funnel - from awareness and acquisition through activation, retention, and expansion - using a combination of global performance marketing, AI-powered workflows, in-product optimization, insights, experimentation, and creative ops engineering.

About the Role

We are hiring a Lifecycle Lead to build the company-wide owned-channel capability that helps teams reach users with relevant, timely, and trustworthy experiences. This senior, hands-on leader will set the lifecycle strategy, partner with Engineering to build the orchestration and deployment platform, and establish the operating model that allows teams across the company to launch and improve evergreen programs safely at scale.

You will sit at the intersection of platform, product, and campaign strategy. You will partner with Engineering, Product, Data Science, and Analytics on the underlying systems, and with Product Marketing Managers and other client teams to design journeys that help new, active, and returning users reach value and build durable habits.

In this role, you will:

• Partner with product to set the company-wide vision, roadmap, and operating model for lifecycle and owned-channel engagement.




• Partner with Engineering, Product, Data Science, and Analytics to shape the tooling and infrastructure for identity, audiences, eligibility, consent, triggers, orchestration, decisioning, frequency, experimentation, localization, quality assurance, and observability.




• Define scalable deployment workflows—including self-service and centrally supported paths, intake, templates, approvals, governance, service levels, and incident response—so teams across the company can launch safely and efficiently.




• Partner with Product Marketing Managers and other client teams to translate audience, product, and business goals into evergreen journey strategies across onboarding, activation, continuation, retention, resurrection, and monetization.




• Lead the design, launch, iteration, and optimization of templates and journeys across email, push, and in-product messaging, including the deep-linked landing and post-click product experiences that complete the loop.




• Partner with Growth DS to build a measurement system that connects reach, eligibility, delivery, engagement, landing behavior, task completion, retained activity, and incremental value through sound experiments and holdouts.




• Optimize the lifecycle portfolio—not just individual sends—by improving inventory, relevance, personalization, prioritization, and per-user frequency.




• Inform our owned channel / upsell strategy–establish a high bar for deliverability, user preferences, localization, and operational quality, and trust while influencing senior stakeholders across the company.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 10+ years of experience in lifecycle, CRM, retention, growth, product marketing, or marketing technology, ideally in a global consumer or subscription business.




• A track record of building and scaling lifecycle tooling or platforms with Engineering for multiple teams, products, audiences, or markets.




• Strong technical and product fluency across event and identity models, data pipelines, APIs, segmentation, triggering, decisioning, experimentation, and deployment systems; coding experience is not required.




• Deep campaign and journey craft, with experience designing evergreen programs that move users from message to product value and durable behavior.




• Strong experimentation and measurement judgment, including incrementality, holdouts, cohort quality, retention, and lifetime value—not just delivery or click metrics.




• Experience creating operating models, governance, templates, and quality standards that increase organizational velocity without creating channel chaos.




• Executive-level cross-functional influence and clear communication across Engineering, Product, Data Science, Analytics, PMM, Creative, Legal, Privacy, and regional teams.




• A hands-on, systems-oriented leadership style: you can set a multi-year direction, write the brief, inspect the journey, diagnose failures, and make pragmatic tradeoffs in a fast-moving environment.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

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