Principal Growth Marketer - Activation

PDS Inc.; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 220,000; Full time

Job summary

PDS Inc. in Seattle seeks a Principal Growth Marketer to own the activation funnel, designing interventions across email, push, in-app, and retargeting to drive new customer transactions.

You’ll run a full lifecycle marketing program with hypotheses, test plans, and data-driven decisions, collaborating with engineers and PMs to instrument metrics and optimize the acquisition engine. This hybrid role requires 3+ days on-site at our Seattle HQ and a track record delivering activation improvements

Qualifications

• 8–12 years in product marketing, lifecycle marketing, or growth with ownership of activation metrics.

Responsibilities

• Own NCAs driven from unactivated customer base as the primary metric.

Skills

Growth Marketing

Product Marketing

Lifecycle Marketing

Funnel Analysis

Experimentation

Roadmapping

Backlog Prioritization

Onboarding Programs

Data Analysis

AI Workflows

Instrumentation

Engineering Collaboration

SaaS Growth

PM Mindset

Education

Engineering / PM background

Tools

Braze

Iterable

Appcues

Job description

About the Role

Every day, Business gains new signups who never complete their first transaction. The Principal Growth Marketer owns the marketing system that changes that: identifying unactivated SMB customers, designing the interventions that move them, and measuring the new customer acquisition (NCA) that result. This is a direct acquisition role and the output is new customers who transact, sourced from a pool who already raised their hand. Reporting to the Head of Marketing, this is not a traditional B2B Product Marketing role focused on messaging frameworks, enablement, or go-to-market launches. It is closer to a product manager who builds in marketing channels: you'll run lifecycle and in-app touchpoints the way a PM runs a feature roadmap with hypotheses, test plans, conversion data, and a clear point of view on what moves the metric and what doesn't. You’ll leverage paid marketing channels for retargeting, driving urgency or limited-time activation promotions. If you think like an engineer, execute like a marketer, and are most comfortable when you own the full system from hypothesis to result - this is that role. This is a hybrid role requiring 3+ days per week in the Seattle headquarters.

Key Responsibilities

• You Will Own NCAs driven from the unactivated customer base as your primary metric.
• Build and maintain the marketing roadmap to grow it with a prioritized experiment backlog, channel mix, and a clear model for investment.
• Design, run, and iterate the full marketing program for marketing activation based on key customer segments: onboarding sequences, re-engagement triggers, milestone nudges, upgrade moments - across email, push, in-app, and retargeting through paid channels.
• Partner directly with the Product Manager owning the product roadmap for the same metric.
• Maintain a shared view of what's being tested on each side and where the highest-leverage interventions are.
• Demand testing - translate conversion data into clear signals for product learning and development.
• Own in-app marketing touchpoints for the activation funnel - banners, modals, tooltips, in-product messaging in close coordination with the PM and Content Designer.
• Own the marketing stack, tooling selection, and budget to activate customers.
• Evaluate what earns a place, deprecate what doesn't, and build the infrastructure that lets you test faster over time.

Qualifications

• You Have 8–12 years in product marketing, lifecycle marketing, or growth — with demonstrated experience owning a conversion or activation metric end to end, not supporting someone else who did.
• A genuine PM instinct: you think in funnels, hypotheses, and experiments.
• You've built roadmaps, prioritized backlogs, and made tradeoff decisions based on business outcome and impact vs effort.
• You've built onboarding and activation programs from scratch across email, push, and in-app, and you have conversion data from those programs you can speak to.
• Fluency with in-app marketing tooling (Braze, Iterable, Appcues, or equivalent) and the ability to QA your own implementations.
• Comfort working directly in data: build a funnel analysis and QA your own conversion events without waiting for an analyst.
• Experience designing or operating AI-assisted workflows in a marketing or growth context.
• You have a point of view on where agents add leverage and where human judgment is non-negotiable.
• The ability to work directly with engineers and PMs to scope instrumentation, event tracking, and tooling integrations.
• You don't write the code but you know exactly what you need and can spec it.
• Experience in fintech, payments, or a two-sided marketplace is a plus
• A background in engineering, product management, or a technical discipline is a strong plus.
• You don't need to have stayed there but people who started there tend to move faster on instrumentation, data modeling, and working with engineers on what's actually feasible.

What Makes This Different

You own the metric, not married to a set of channels. This one owns an acquisition outcome and builds whatever combination of channels, touchpoints, and tooling moves it. The agent architecture is yours to design. This isn't a company that will hand you a martech stack and ask you to fill it. Most businesses that sign up don't complete their first transaction. Recovering that population systematically through marketing intervention is a more interesting acquisition problem for you than running another paid campaign.

Compensation

$200k

Equal Opportunity Employer

PDSINC, LLC is an Equal Opportunity Employer.