Performance Marketing Lead

CardFlight is a company dedicated to empowering small businesses to accept electronic payments with ease. They are seeking a Performance Marketing Lead to own acquisition execution and measurement, generating profitable traffic and qualified leads through various channels while leveraging AI for growth experiments and rigorous attribution.

Responsibilities:

• You own paid acquisition from spend to revenue outcome. That means hitting payback period targets, improving unit economics over time, and making disciplined channel decisions based on what the data actually says
• Daily optimization: bid strategies, audience refinement, creative testing, landing page variants
• Weekly decision-making: scale, iterate, or kill based on actual CAC and conversion data
• You manage the budget like it's your money because we track every dollar to closed revenue
• Build and manage affiliate/referral programs that generate qualified merchant leads
• Recruit partners, negotiate terms, create offers that convert
• Own tracking infrastructure so we know exactly what drives what
• Merchant comparison sites, industry aggregators, referral networks—if it performs, you scale it
• Find channels our competitors haven't discovered or exhausted yet
• Test unconventional tactics: Reddit communities, vertical-specific forums, niche directories
• Launch rapid experiments with clear hypotheses and kill criteria
• Build and run agentic AI workflows that compress testing cycles — automated variant generation, performance reads, and iteration loops with minimal manual intervention
• You achieve CAC/payback periods at target and keep it there or, better. You do that by staying close to the data, killing what isn't working without sentiment, and doubling down on what is
• You run a constant testing loop. There's always an experiment running, always a hypothesis being validated or killed. You're not waiting for permission to try something new, and you're not holding on to campaigns out of inertia
• You feed sales leads that are actually worth their time. You stay close to close rates and disqualification reasons, and you let that feedback reshape targeting, qualification filters, and channel mix. If sales are burning hours on bad leads, that's your problem to fix
• Over time, you build a diversified acquisition engine, not one channel with everything riding on it. Paid search anchors it early, but affiliates, partnerships, and unconventional channels earn their place by performing, not by existing
• The scoreboard is simple: merchants acquired, CAC by channel, lead-to-approval rate, and payback period. If those move in the right direction, you get more to work with. If they don't, we find out why and fix it fast

Requirements:

• 3-5+ years running profitable paid acquisition in B2B SaaS, fintech, payments, or similarly competitive markets, experience with application or underwriting a plus
• You've personally managed tens of thousands in monthly ad spend and can show the CAC, conversion rates, and ROAS you achieved
• Built something from zero to scale, not just optimized existing programs
• Deep ad platform fluency: campaign structure, bidding strategies, Quality Score optimization, audience layering
• Attribution competence in a cookieless environment, first-party data strategy, server-side tracking, CRM integration, modeled and multi-touch attribution
• Affiliate/partnership experience, you've recruited partners, structured offers, and tracked performance
• Comfortable with constraints, you've made small budgets work, not just managed large ones as this is about efficiency first
• Agentic workflows, you've built or orchestrated multi-step AI pipelines that run tests, read outputs, and iterate. Not prompting a chatbot for headlines; actually compressing work that used to take days into hours
• Velocity, your testing throughput is demonstrably faster because of how you use AI tools, and you can prove it with results. You also know where AI breaks down and you validate before you act