Director, Paid & Digital

Cognition•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

We are an applied AI lab building end-to-end software agents. We're the makers of Devin, the first AI software engineer. Our team is extremely talent-dense. Among our founding team, we have world-class competitive programmers, former founders, and leaders from companies at the cutting edge of AI including Scale AI, Palantir, Cursor, Waymo, Tesla, Lunchclub, Modal, Google DeepMind, and Nuro. Building Devin is just the first step—our hardest challenges still lie ahead. If you’re excited to solve some of the world’s biggest problems and build AI that can reason on real-world tasks, apply to join us. We're looking for a Director of Paid & Digital to build and scale Cognition's paid demand engine. You'll own the strategy and execution behind how we use paid distribution to reach the engineers, technical leaders, and enterprise buyers shaping the future of software development. This goes beyond managing ad platforms. You'll determine where Cognition should invest, which audiences we need to reach, what we should put in front of them, and how we turn that attention into qualified enterprise pipeline. You'll operate across established channels like paid search, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, and other social platforms, while continuously identifying new opportunities across technical publications, newsletters, communities, creators, sponsorships, and emerging channels. This is a highly hands-on role. You'll build the strategy and execute it: launching campaigns, analyzing performance, developing audiences, reviewing search queries, testing creative, evaluating new channels, and deciding where the next dollar should go.

Requirements

8+ years of experience in paid acquisition, growth marketing, digital marketing, or demand generation, ideally in a high-growth B2B technology company.
Experience managing and scaling significant paid media budgets.
Deep hands-on expertise across major advertising platforms, particularly paid search and LinkedIn.
Strong understanding of enterprise B2B buying journeys and account-based marketing.
Experience testing channels beyond traditional paid media.
Strong creative instincts and experience building systematic creative testing programs.
Exceptional analytical ability and comfort connecting media performance to pipeline and revenue.
Comfortable owning both strategy and execution.
Experience working closely with Product Marketing, Design, Web/Growth, RevOps, and Sales.
Strong commercial judgment and the ability to distinguish meaningful business outcomes from attractive marketing metrics.
Highly hands-on. You're comfortable opening an ad account, digging into campaign performance, writing a brief, evaluating a media opportunity, launching a test, and deciding what to do next.
Excited about AI and interested in using it to fundamentally change how performance marketing operates.

Nice To Haves

You're not looking to inherit a media plan and optimize it.
You want to figure out where Cognition's next million dollars of efficient growth should come from.
You're equally comfortable scaling a proven channel, killing an underperforming campaign, testing an unconventional distribution partner, developing a new offer, or digging into the data to understand why a campaign generated leads but no pipeline.
You combine the analytical rigor of a performance marketer with the curiosity of a growth marketer and the commercial instincts of an enterprise demand generation leader.
And you want to build, not just manage.

Responsibilities

Build Cognition's Paid Demand Engine: Own Cognition's paid acquisition and distribution strategy with a focus on generating qualified enterprise pipeline. Determine the right channel mix, investment strategy, audiences, offers, and campaign architecture as we scale. Build a clear understanding of where our highest-value audiences spend their time and how we can reach them. Allocate budget dynamically based on performance and opportunity rather than fixed channel assumptions. Build the systems, processes, and measurement framework required to scale paid investment significantly. Partner with sales, operations, and sales enablement to ensure leads are qualified and are effectively worked.
Own Paid Media: Own strategy and execution across paid search, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, Meta, X, and other relevant platforms. Build sophisticated audience and account strategies around enterprise segments, personas, intent, and buying stage. Capture high-intent demand while creating demand among accounts that may not yet be actively searching. Continuously optimize campaigns based on pipeline quality and downstream business outcomes—not just clicks, leads, or platform-reported conversions. Maintain deep expertise in the platforms and stay close enough to execution to identify opportunities others miss.
Expand Paid Distribution Beyond Traditional Advertising: Identify and test new channels where technical and enterprise audiences spend attention. Build partnerships across relevant newsletters, technical publications, developer and enterprise communities, podcasts, creators, influencers, and other emerging distribution channels. Evaluate opportunities based on audience quality, enterprise relevance, scale potential, economics, and ability to test. Build a repeatable process for finding, testing, measuring, and scaling new sources of demand. Continuously challenge where Cognition should be spending its next dollar.
Build a High-Velocity Experimentation Engine: Run a continuous pipeline of experiments across channel × audience × message × creative × offer × format × landing experience. Develop clear hypotheses and success criteria before launching tests. Test fundamentally different approaches rather than only optimizing existing campaigns. Quickly scale what works and shut down what doesn't. Build a culture where experimentation velocity increases as the paid program grows. Track investment impact throughout the sales journey. Turn individual campaign learnings into insights that improve the broader Demand Gen strategy.
Build the Creative Testing System: Develop a systematic approach to paid creative experimentation. Identify which messages, narratives, customer proof, product capabilities, and formats resonate with different audiences. Partner with Product Marketing and Design to maintain a consistent pipeline of new creative concepts. Test across video, static, product-led creative, customer proof, technical content, executive perspectives, and emerging formats. Use performance data to inform the next generation of creative rather than simply requesting more assets.
Develop Offers That Create Demand: Partner with Web/CRO, Product Marketing, and the broader Demand Gen team to determine what we should put paid distribution behind. Test different offers across stages of the enterprise buying journey—from product experiences and technical content to customer proof, benchmarks, assessments, executive content, and direct sales engagement. Identify when the existing offer isn't working and help develop something better. Match the right offer to the right audience rather than sending every campaign to the same conversion path.
Optimize for Enterprise Pipeline: Measure success based on qualified enterprise pipeline and downstream business impact. Partner with RevOps to understand performance from impression → account engagement → opportunity → pipeline. Understand performance by audience, account segment, channel, campaign, offer, and creative. Develop clear frameworks for CAC, pipeline efficiency, marginal spend, and incrementality. Use data to determine where Cognition should increase, decrease, or reallocate investment.
Work AI-Natively: Use AI aggressively across research, audience development, campaign creation, creative iteration, analysis, and optimization. Build workflows that allow the paid program to operate with exceptional speed and leverage. Experiment with emerging AI-native advertising, discovery, and distribution channels as they develop.