Growth Lead, SMB Ads

About the Team OpenAI's Marketing team helps customers understand, adopt, and get value from OpenAI's products and platform. The SMB Ads Marketing team is building the growth engine for small and medium-sized business advertisers: helping them discover the platform, sign up, launch campaigns, understand performance, and grow spend over time. We take a data-driven approach to understanding customer needs, market dynamics, and funnel behavior. We partner closely with Product, Engineering, Data Science, Sales, Partnerships, Finance, Operations, Design, and Communications to create a cohesive end-to-end advertiser experience and help businesses unlock value from OpenAI's advertising platform. About the Role We are hiring a Growth Lead, SMB Ads to build and scale how small businesses discover, adopt, and grow with OpenAI's advertising platform. This person will own acquisition and activation growth for SMB advertisers, with a focus on bringing new advertisers into the funnel and helping them reach first meaningful spend. This is a strategic and hands-on growth role at the intersection of acquisition, activation, performance marketing, product-led growth, experimentation, and advertiser education. You will diagnose where the funnel is constrained, define and run high-impact experiments, improve sign-up and onboarding journeys, and partner with product teams to make the advertiser experience clearer, faster, and more effective. You will use data, customer insight, and AI-native workflows to move quickly from problem diagnosis to shipped growth programs. Over time, this role is expected to help shape the acquisition and activation function for SMB Ads as the team grows. In This Role, You Will: Develop and execute acquisition and activation strategies that help SMB advertisers discover, sign up for, and begin spending on OpenAI's advertising platform. Diagnose the advertiser funnel across awareness, landing pages, sign-up, onboarding, campaign creation, first spend, and early repeat spend. Own the SMB acquisition strategy across paid, organic search (SEO & GEO), social, partnerships, referrals, product-led growth, and emerging channels, continuously optimizing channel mix, CAC, activation, and first-sp Partner with Product and Engineering to improve sign-up flows, onboarding, campaign setup, billing, measurement, and first-spend experiences. Translate SMB customer insight into positioning, messaging, funnel improvements, advertiser education, and product feedback. Use AI tools to accelerate experimentation, analysis, prototyping, campaign development, creative variation, and internal growth workflows. Build operating rhythms for experiment planning, performance readouts, funnel diagnostics, and cross-functional growth decisions. Work with contractors, agencies, or growth operators as needed to increase execution velocity. Help define how the acquisition and activation function should scale over time. You Might Thrive in This Role If You: Have significant experience in growth marketing, product growth, performance marketing, demand generation, or SMB go-to-market roles with measurable ownership of acquisition, activation, or revenue outcomes. Have improved self-serve, product-led, SMB, merchant, advertiser, or high-volume customer funnels & can move from strategy to execution quickly Are highly analytical and comfortable using funnel analysis, cohort analysis, experimentation, and business metrics to make decisions. Have strong product instincts and can partner closely with Product, Engineering, and Data Science to improve conversion and customer experience. Are AI-native in how you work, using tools to move faster, generate leverage, prototype ideas, analyze data, and improve marketing workflows. Can simplify complex advertising products into clear, compelling narratives for small business owners, operators, and marketers. Have experience growing advertisers, merchants, creators, or SMB customers through scaled self-serve platforms suc