Performance Marketing Manager

AppLovin•Palo Alto, CA

21d•$119,000 - $179,000•Remote

About The Position

AppLovin makes technologies that help businesses of every size connect to their ideal customers. The company provides end-to-end advertising solutions for businesses to reach, monetize and grow their global audiences. Gist is a new social media platform for people who want substance — practical, thoughtful content that spans philosophy debates, city-specific recommendations, seasonal gift guides, and wellness tips. Across categories like travel, food, career, and family, we describe it as "a handbook for the curious." Gist is built by AppLovin Corporation — a company that hit $5.3B in revenue last year and sits alongside Google and Meta as one of the world's leading ad tech platforms. Fortune recognizes AppLovin as one of the Best Workplaces in the Bay Area, and the company has been a Certified Great Place to Work for the last four years (2021–2024). We're hiring a founding Performance Marketing Manager to own all of paid growth for Gist — every channel, every dollar, every partnership. You'll set the performance marketing strategy, build the measurement foundation, and run the testing loops across Meta, TikTok, Google, and programmatic that give us real control over CAC from day one. No team to delegate to, no playbook to inherit. You are the expert in the room, and everything paid runs through you.

Requirements

3-7 years of brand-side performance marketing experience, with direct ownership of budgets and outcomes for a consumer app, marketplace, or digital product.
Proven experience driving growth from a cold start, having launched performance marketing for a new product or market from zero.
Hands-on fluency across Meta Ads Manager, TikTok Ads Manager, and Google Ads.
Demonstrated experience managing off-platform or non-self-serve partnerships (ad networks, OEM or device partnerships, media direct buys, affiliate or performance platforms, or similar), including negotiating deals and managing relationships independently.
Experience with mobile attribution tooling like Adjust or equivalent, with the ability to set up and own measurement infrastructure end-to-end.
Proficiency in key metrics: CAC, CPI, LTV, ROAS, Day 7/30 payback, and funnel conversion rates, with the ability to diagnose performance shifts.
Strong negotiation and partner management skills.
Senior individual contributor mindset, thriving independently and setting strategy.

Nice To Haves

Experience running performance marketing specifically for a social, entertainment, or consumer app.
Exposure to influencer or KOL-driven paid amplification as an acquisition channel.
Familiarity with incrementality testing, geo-splits, or media mix modelling.
SQL or BI tool fluency (Looker, Tableau, Metabase) for self-serve analysis.

Responsibilities

Manage every paid channel, including Meta, TikTok, Google, programmatic, ad networks, and emerging channels.
Identify, negotiate, and manage relationships with external partners such as media companies, OEM and on-device distribution partners, ad networks, affiliate and performance platforms, and publisher direct buys.
Own the monthly performance marketing budget with full accountability to CAC, CPI, LTV, and ROAS, dynamically allocating across channels and partners based on performance.
Set up tracking to extract meaningful signal for diagnosing performance shifts, identifying what's working, and translating data into clear actions.
Run structured tests across audiences, creatives, bidding strategies, ad formats, and partner inventory, documenting learnings to build a compounding playbook.
Be accountable for not just installs but for quality users, partnering with product and growth teams to understand post-install behavior and optimize toward activation and retention.
Explore non-obvious distribution channels such as influencer/KOL paid amplification, content seeding partnerships, cross-platform distribution deals, and incentivised install ecosystems.