Senior Paid Acquisition Manager, Paid Social

Gusto•San Francisco, NY

8h•$108,570 - $161,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Gusto is seeking a seasoned Paid Acquisition Manager to own execution across paid social and emerging acquisition channels, testing platforms, formats, and tactics before scaling. The role sits at the intersection of performance marketing, channel experimentation, and AI-powered workflow design. The manager owns day-to-day strategy and execution for paid social and new channel tests within Gusto’s demand generation framework, with accountability to pipeline and revenue targets. The position is part of the Demand Generation team and is embedded in Paid Acquisition, a focused group driving awareness and pipeline through paid media. The team operates with autonomy, a bias for experimentation, cross-functional partnership, and an expectation that team members work in an AI-native way. The role owns paid social campaigns across Meta, LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, and TikTok; manages significant multi-million-dollar budgets; leads creative strategy and testing; and helps refine measurement and budget-allocation principles. It also serves as a team resource for paid social and AI-powered marketing workflows, tests new digital media channels and formats, and partners with marketing, web, brand, engineering, and other teams to improve campaign execution, conversion, and measurement. The role is associated with Gusto offices in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City, and with the Scottsdale office for Symmetry roles. Employees based in these locations are expected to work in the office on designated days approximately 2–3 days per week or more depending on role. Approved work from other locations requires a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection. Compensation ranges by location: $108,570–$133,000 per year in Denver and Scottsdale, and $131,430–$161,000 per year in San Francisco and New York. Gusto states that full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs).

Requirements

At least 7 years of performance marketing experience at a B2B SaaS company, performance marketing agency, or high-growth consumer organization.
Deep expertise in paid social and a track record of testing and scaling new channels.
Full-funnel ownership across at least two major paid social platforms among Meta, LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, and TikTok.
Hands-on, in-platform experience with campaign builds, audience and targeting strategy, creative testing, and bid and budget management.
Significant budget responsibility and a record of driving measurable pipeline impact.
Strong creative strategy and testing skills, including structuring tests, distinguishing learnings from results, and translating performance data into creative direction.
Practical AI fluency: consistent use of AI tools in day-to-day work to accelerate briefs, copy, and analysis, and a record of implementing AI-driven efficiencies for a team.
Strong cross-functional collaboration skills, including translating integrated briefs into paid social strategy and working effectively with brand, web, and communications partners.
Analytical and data-driven approach, a clear point of view on attribution in imperfect measurement environments, and comfort communicating paid social’s contribution to business outcomes.

Responsibilities

Own paid social strategy and execution across Meta, LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, and TikTok, managing full-funnel campaigns from brand awareness through retargeting and conversion against pipeline and revenue targets.
Manage multi-million-dollar budgets, including pacing, forecasting, budget-versus-actuals analysis, and advocating for paid social investment in imperfect attribution environments.
Apply and help refine Gusto’s paid acquisition measurement framework, including attribution philosophy and budget-allocation principles, with the broader marketing team.
Lead creative strategy and testing at scale by briefing creative studios and agencies, structuring experiments, interpreting data, and building a learning roadmap.
Serve as the team’s go-to expert on paid social and AI-powered marketing workflows, documenting playbooks and best practices.
Use AI tools consistently to generate campaign briefs, develop copy variants, accelerate audience research, and build reusable systems for the team.
Identify, test, and validate new digital media channels and formats, including Google Demand Generation campaigns and ChatGPT ads; run pilots, define success criteria, and recommend whether to scale or stop tests within budget guardrails.
Partner with Web Marketing on landing-page strategy, message match, and post-click conversion.
Work with the Brand and Influencer team to turn successful organic and influencer content into paid campaigns and feed performance results back into future content decisions.
Collaborate with Engineering to launch pixels and tracking, troubleshoot platform-side issues, and QA implementations.
Partner with Integrated Marketing, Product Marketing, Sales, Communications, and Web to align paid social with integrated campaigns and earned media, and share performance data to inform creative production and asset strategy.