Senior Performance Marketing Manager, Paid Social

The Team:

Upstart’s Digital Marketing team drives scalable, data-driven customer acquisition across our lending products via performance marketing channels. We design, execute, and optimize digital media strategies that connect consumers to credit at the moments that matter most. Through rigorous experimentation, channel optimization, and disciplined CAC management, the team plays a critical role in fueling Upstart’s growth while maintaining strong unit economics for the business.

As the Senior Performance Marketing Manager, Paid Social, you will own the strategy, execution, and growth of paid social acquisition for Upstart’s Personal Loans business. You will be a hands-on media buyer responsible for building profitable scale across social platforms, partnering closely with our media agency while maintaining direct ownership of performance, testing, and optimization.

This role sits at the intersection of media buying, creative strategy, audience development, and marketing analytics. You will translate business goals into channel strategy, identify opportunities to improve conversion and efficiency, and work cross-functionally to develop the creative, targeting, and measurement capabilities needed to grow Personal Loans profitably.

This role offers exceptional ownership and visibility, with the chance to make a material impact on one of Upstart’s newest and most strategic product lines while laying the foundation for long-term growth.

How you’ll make an impact

• Own and optimize paid social and video acquisition for Personal Loans, managing campaign strategy, setup, bidding, budgets, pacing, and performance across key platforms.
• Work closely with our media agency to establish channel strategy, manage execution, evaluate recommendations, and hold the partnership accountable to volume, CAC, and profitability goals.
• Be hands-on in the platform, using performance data to make media investments, optimization decisions, and improve campaign efficiency.
• Develop and execute a creative strategy in partnership with Creative and agency teams, including testing frameworks, messaging hypotheses, formats, production priorities, and creative performance analysis.
• Build and refine audience strategies across prospecting, retargeting, customer lists, lookalikes, and other first- and third-party audience solutions.
• Drive geo-list targeting and geographic experimentation with our analytics team to identify incremental growth opportunities, improve channel economics, and bring paid social toward profitability.
• Design and analyze structured tests across audiences, creative, bidding, placements, geographies, and funnel experiences, using incrementality and down-funnel performance to guide investment decisions.
• Partner with Analytics, Product Marketing, Creative, Lifecycle, and Growth Product teams to improve the full acquisition funnel from impression through funded loan.
• Manage and forecast significant media budgets, balancing growth, customer volume, and contribution economics while adapting quickly to changing performance trends.

Minimum Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in performance marketing or digital media buying, with significant hands-on experience managing paid social and video campaigns.
• Proven experience owning and scaling paid social acquisition programs against CAC, CPA, ROI, revenue, or profitability goals.
• Demonstrated expertise in paid social platforms, including campaign structure, bidding, budgeting, audience management, creative testing, and performance optimization.
• Experience partnering with external media agencies, including setting strategy, reviewing performance, challenging recommendations, and managing executional accountability.
• Experience developing or executing a paid media creative strategy, including messaging, format, testing, and performance analysis.
• Strong analytical skills, with the ability to interpret channel and funnel data, design experiments, and make investment decisions in ambiguous environments.
• Experience using geographic targeting, geo experiments, customer lists, or other audience segmentation approaches to improve acquisition efficiency and measure incrementality.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience operating in highly regulated or longer consideration cycle verticals (e.g., financial services, fintech, lending, insurance, marketplaces).
• Experience launching and scaling new channels or products from zero to one, with comfort operating in ambiguity and building an acquisition funnel from scratch.
• Experience working closely with product and engineering teams to improve landing pages, funnels, and on-site conversion through testing and iteration.

Location

Remote, United States. The team operates on East and West coast time zones. Most Upstarters can live and work anywhere in the U.S. and meet in person for periodic onsites.

The anticipated base salary range is $138,600 to $192,000 USD, depending on geographic location, plus target bonus and equity.