Startup Growth Lead

Mechanism Ventures

3d•Remote

About The Position

Mechanism builds profitable companies and turns them into enterprises. Since 2019, we’ve launched and scaled 10 companies while driving $200M+ in revenue by treating company-building as an engineering problem—not an art project. We combine rigorous validation, advanced analytics, and repeatable systems to dramatically increase the odds of success. Today, we are pushing that model further: building an operating system for entrepreneurship that allows us to launch profitable, reinvesting companies with speed, precision, and minimal waste—companies designed to reach millions, and eventually billions, of people. This role sits at the center of that system. The Startup Growth Lead is a founding-level growth operator embedded full-time in a single, heavily pre-validated startup. You are not searching for an idea. You are not fighting bureaucracy. You are not spread thin across functions. You are brought in to build and prove the growth engine—fast. You will own growth end-to-end, from first experiments through repeatable, profitable scale. Your job is to turn a validated thesis, real resources, and a clean slate into a growth system that works—and then hand it off cleanly so the company can scale. This is a co-founder–level role in practice, with accountability for outcomes—not hand-offs. Each company pairs: A high-caliber fractional CEO, responsible for overall company leadership and removing obstacles A Startup Growth Lead, responsible for designing, executing, and scaling the growth engine A centralized Mechanism team providing engineering, design, data, automation, and operational leverage Our explicit goal is to maximize your leverage—so small, correct inputs produce outsized results. Think rolling boulders downhill, not pushing them uphill.

Requirements

5+ years building and scaling growth engines in early-stage companies
Deep hands-on experience with Google Ads, Meta Ads, and CRO
Strong first-principles and systems thinking
High-speed, high-quality execution under ambiguity
Strong written and verbal communication
Comfort leveraging AI, automation, and modern growth tooling

Responsibilities

Growth strategy and prioritization
Channel discovery, testing, and validation
Building a repeatable, profitable acquisition system
Customer understanding and feedback loops
Proving positive unit economics and a path to scale
Own growth end-to-end for a newly launched company, with profitability as the primary KPI
Design and execute the growth strategy across acquisition, conversion, retention, and monetization
Build and maintain a clear growth model defining assumptions, targets, and constraints
Design fast, disciplined experiments to validate demand, channels, pricing, and positioning
Personally own or directly oversee: Paid acquisition (especially Google Ads and Meta) Conversion rate optimization Landing pages and funnel testing Retention and lifecycle systems where relevant
Scale what works, kill what doesn’t—quickly and decisively
Partner closely with product, engineering, and design to translate growth insights into high-leverage changes
Participate in board meetings to share growth strategy, results, learnings, and blockers
Document systems, playbooks, and learnings so they can be reused across future launches
Leverage AI and automation to increase speed, clarity, and effectiveness
Transition growth ownership to a long-term team once the engine is stable and repeatable