Director of Growth Marketing - Performance

Earnest empowers ambitious professionals to make confident financial decisions and build the life they envision. Earnies are committed to helping borrowers move forward with confidence by offering smarter borrowing options with a clearer path to taking control of their debt. If you’re as passionate as we are about our mission, read more below, and let’s build something great together. The Director of Growth Marketing - Performance will report to our VP of Performance Marketing. As a Director of Growth Marketing - Performance, you will: • Own Core Channel Performance: Start by evaluating current strategy, execution, and performance then set the plan to accelerate results (SEM, Paid Social, SEO/AEO). • Aggressively Expand into New High-ROI Channels: Own the channel expansion strategy–prioritization, testing, and the call to scale (Programmatic, OTT, OOH, Streaming Audio, etc.). Build the measurement frameworks with the analytics/attribution team so each scale decision is backed by data. • Build the paid channel strategy for Personal Loans: As the company shifts from single-product to multi-product lending in 2027. Set how budget, channel mix, and testing priorities shift as PL scales alongside new products. • Transform how the team works into an AI-first marketing organization: identify which workflows AI can take over or accelerate, and drive adoption within the first 90 days. • Develop Team Structure and Strategy: define the ideal mix of FTE, contract, agency and AI capacity to drive the most impact. • Act as player-coach to a team of Growth Marketing Managers: Setting strategy and staying hands-on with campaign builds, testing, and analysis. About You: • Energized by the pace of change in paid marketing–always looking for the next way to win. • Data drives everything you do–but you're not afraid to trust your intuition or run an experiment when data is incomplete or slow to arrive. • You want to have a massive impact within the company and are energized by ambiguity rather than needing a fully defined playbook. • Cross-functional leadership: you can develop a vision, get buy-in from stakeholders who don't report to you (product, data science, compliance, advanced analytics), and see it through to completion. • Comfortable operating at both altitudes–setting long term strategy in one meeting and analyzing SEM performance in the next. • A builder's mindset: energized by creating something from scratch, not just optimizing an existing machine. Even Better: • Experience in fintech, lending, or another regulated B2C category. • Experience at a high-growth startup or growth-stage company. • Strong SQL–you don’t have to wait for an analyst, you get your own answers and can coach your team to do the same. • Piloted and scaled advanced measurement approaches (incrementality testing, geo holdouts, MMM, MTA). Heads Up: • You will be accountable for being on the cutting edge of new channels, and moving them into testing quickly. • You will be building the data-driven machine–this is not a defined playbook or "operate an existing machine" type of role. • This is a player/coach role with meaningful hands-on-keyboard time. • The expectation is that AI will transform how the team operates and impact every critical workflow within the first 90 days. • This role requires navigating a regulated environment–every new channel and personalization tactic needs to clear compliance before it ships, which will shape your pace and process. Where: • This role will be based in the US. Compensation: A little about our pay philosophy: We take pride in compensating our employees fairly and equitably. We are showcasing a range of your potential base salary based on the roles location. The successful candidate’s starting pay will al