Senior Retention Specialist, CRM

Darkroom•New York, NY

11d•$60,000 - $80,000•Remote

About The Position

Darkroom is hiring a deeply technical Senior Retention Specialist to build and own CRM for a high-growth consumer technology client. The role involves establishing the program from the ground up, starting with a list of approximately 20,000 subscribers and scaling alongside significant acquisition investment. The specialist will own CRM flows and automations, segmentation logic, technical platform health, deliverability, and channel KPIs. Email volume is expected to grow to 40–60 sends per month, supported by increasingly granular segmentation. The program's automation priorities include lead capture, welcome and first-conversion journeys, followed by subscription activation, loyalty, repeat purchase, and win-back. The role uses an enterprise-grade ESP such as Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Iterable, Customer.io, or a comparable platform. The specialist is expected to troubleshoot platform, rendering, data, and deliverability issues and work with the client's engineering team on data integrations. The role requires working PST hours and includes monthly travel to San Francisco. Darkroom describes its culture as fast-moving, collaborative, and focused on autonomy, accountability, performance, creativity, and ownership. The role is remote-first, with weekly office attendance expected for employees based in or near the New York or Lisbon headquarters.

Requirements

3–5+ years of hands-on lifecycle, CRM, or email marketing execution, with deep expertise in at least one enterprise-grade ESP such as Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Iterable, Customer.io, or comparable.
Experience building complex event-triggered journeys from scratch, including multi-branch logic, wait steps, conditional splits, holdouts, and cross-channel orchestration across email, SMS, push, and in-app.
Advanced segmentation skills, including behavioral and product-event-based segmentation, computed attributes, and dynamic and personalized content.
Experience scaling a program where segmentation drove an increase in send volume.
Experience building lead capture forms and opt-in logic, welcome series, first-conversion sequences, and subscription activation journeys.
Experience implementing loyalty, rewards, and win-back programs, with a focus on repeat purchase and long-term value.
Knowledge of deliverability, including domain warming and authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, BIMI), sending reputation, list hygiene, sunset policies, and managing rapid list growth.
Ability to own and diagnose channel KPIs, including opens, clicks, click-to-open, conversion, deliverability, bounces, spam complaints, and unsubscribes.
Comfort with HTML and CSS for email and building templates and modules that render correctly across email clients.
Understanding of data flows into an ESP, including API-based events, webhooks, ETL or CDP integrations, and product event streams, with the ability to discuss technical topics with a client's engineering team.
Systematic troubleshooting skills, including isolating variables, checking data, and documenting findings.
Ability to design and execute A/B and multivariate tests and assess statistical significance honestly.
Excellent written communication and ability to explain technical problems clearly to non-technical audiences.
Ability to work PST hours; monthly travel to San Francisco is required.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Liquid, Handlebars, AMPscript, or a similar templating language.

Responsibilities

Build and QA CRM flows, automations, and campaigns spanning lead capture, welcome, activation, loyalty, repeat purchase, and win-back.
Implement segmentation and audience logic for the campaign calendar and build dynamic content for personalization at scale.
Own the technical setup and health of the client's ESP, including integrations, data feeds, event tracking, templates, and modules.
Monitor channel performance and deliverability, and resolve or escalate issues before they affect the program.
Troubleshoot misfiring flows, under-populated segments, broken templates, and other technical issues, and document fixes.
QA each build end to end before launch, including logic, rendering, links, personalization, and suppression.
Design and run a testing roadmap with the Associate Director and report results honestly.
Partner with the Copy & Content Specialist to implement copy and creative accurately and on schedule.
Build and maintain reporting for the Associate Director's client KPI reviews.