Senior Retention Specialist, CRM

Darkroom•New York, NY

2d•$60,000 - $80,000•Remote

About The Position

We are looking for a deeply technical Senior Retention Specialist to own the CRM build for a high-growth consumer technology client. You will architect and implement the flows and automations that carry the program, own the segmentation logic behind them, and hold the channel KPIs that determine whether any of it lands in the inbox. You are standing this program up from the ground, not inheriting it. The list starts near 20,000 and scales rapidly behind a significant acquisition investment — which puts real pressure on deliverability, list hygiene, and data hygiene from day one. Volume ramps to 40–60 emails a month, and increasingly granular segmentation is what generates that output. Automation is the core of the program: lead capture, welcome series, and the first-conversion funnel first, then subscription activation, loyalty, repeat purchase, and win-back. You will work in an enterprise-grade platform — Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Iterable, Customer.io, or comparable. You are the person who knows the platform better than anyone else on the team. When something does not fire, does not render, or does not deliver, you find out why.

Requirements

3–5+ years of hands-on lifecycle, CRM, or email marketing execution, with deep expertise in at least one enterprise-grade ESP — Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Iterable, Customer.io, or comparable.
You have built complex, event-triggered journeys from scratch: multi-branch logic, wait steps, conditional splits, holdouts, and cross-channel orchestration across email, SMS, push, and in-app.
You are fluent in advanced segmentation — behavioral and product-event based, computed attributes, dynamic and personalized content — and you have scaled a program where segmentation drove a real increase in send volume.
You have built the funnel that matters here: lead capture forms and opt-in logic, welcome series, first-conversion sequences, and subscription activation journeys.
You have implemented loyalty, rewards, and win-back programs, and you treat driving repeat purchase and long-term value as a core outcome rather than a nice-to-have.
You own deliverability as a discipline: domain warming and authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, BIMI), sending reputation, list hygiene, sunset policies, and what to do when a list grows very fast.
You own the channel KPIs — open, click, click-to-open, conversion, deliverability, bounce, spam complaints, unsubscribe — and you can diagnose a drop in any of them.
You are comfortable with HTML and CSS for email, and you know how to build templates and modules that render correctly across clients.
You understand data flows into the ESP: API-based events, webhooks, ETL or CDP integrations, and product event streams. You can hold a technical conversation with a client's engineering team.
You are a systematic troubleshooter — you isolate variables, you check the data before the theory, and you document what you find.
You design and execute proper tests: A/B and multivariate, with honest reads on significance.
Excellent written communication and the ability to explain a technical problem to a non-technical audience clearly and without condescension.

Nice To Haves

Liquid, Handlebars, AMPscript, or a similar templating language is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

Build and QA the flows, automations, and campaigns that run your client's program — from lead capture and welcome through activation, loyalty, repeat purchase, and win-back.
Implement the segmentation and audience logic behind the calendar, and build the dynamic content that makes personalization work at volume.
Own the technical setup and health of the client's ESP instance: integrations, data feeds, event tracking, templates, and modules.
Monitor and own channel performance and deliverability, escalating and fixing issues before they affect the program.
Troubleshoot anything that misfires — a flow that does not trigger, a segment that under-populates, a template that breaks in Outlook — and document the fix.
QA every build end to end before launch: logic, rendering, links, personalization, suppression.
Design and run the testing roadmap with your Associate Director, and report results honestly.
Partner with the Copy & Content Specialist to get copy and creative into the build accurately and on schedule.
Build and maintain the reporting your Associate Director needs for client KPI reviews.