Growth Specialist

About the Role

We’re partnering with a stealth, venture-backed AI consumer startup rethinking how people form meaningful romantic connections. Instead of building another swipe-based dating app, the company uses conversational AI to deeply understand users, identify compatible matches, and facilitate real-world dates. The startup operates at the intersection of AI, consumer technology, marketplaces, and lifestyle branding, with over 10,000 users in San Francisco and plans to expand city by city across the U.S.

The team of approximately 18 people is engineering-heavy, based in Cow Hollow, San Francisco, and backed by $10M in seed funding from leading consumer and technology investors. The company includes talent from Uber, Uber Eats, and Afterpay. We’re hiring a Founding Growth Operator to work directly with the co-founder and turn the early go-to-market (GTM) motion into a repeatable national growth engine.

This role is hands-on and operational, requiring you to take ideas, turn them into executable plans, measure results, and build scalable systems. You’ll help operationalize the GTM motion for expansion into San Diego, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and beyond.

Responsibilities

• Build, refine, and operationalize a repeatable GTM playbook for launching new cities.
• Own city-launch planning and execution, including budgets, timelines, priorities, owners, and dependencies.
• Build and manage partnerships with external stakeholders.
• Oversee UGC creators and creator programs.
• Coordinate digital and offline growth initiatives, including creative campaigns and local-market activations.
• Track acquisition, growth, and city-level performance metrics.
• Analyze performance to determine what to scale, change, or discontinue.
• Develop dashboards, operating cadences, and systems to streamline growth management.
• Translate creative growth ideas into executable plans.
• Create increasingly repeatable and efficient launch processes.
• Collaborate closely with product, engineering, creative, and leadership teams.
• Identify unconventional ways to drive consumer awareness and acquisition.
• Travel with the team for 2-3 week launch sprints in new markets.

The goal is to build the operating system that enables the company to launch the next five, ten, and eventually many more cities efficiently.

Requirements

The ideal candidate has 2-10 years of experience in growth, GTM, or growth operations, though stronger or more experienced candidates who want to remain hands-on are also encouraged to apply. You should have startup experience where you executed growth initiatives, not just recommended them.

• Growth or GTM experience at an early-stage startup.
• Experience at a Series A or Series B consumer company or another business that underwent hypergrowth.
• Background in consumer technology, marketplace, mobile, or consumer-brand spaces.
• Ownership of meaningful growth initiatives from start to finish.
• Experience operationalizing GTM or growth strategies.
• Coordination of budgets, timelines, partnerships, creators, campaigns, or market launches.
• Strong GTM strategy and execution capabilities.
• Analytical skills and comfort working with growth metrics.
• Experience with data analysis and operational modeling.
• Strong consumer marketing and creative instincts.
• Ability to build structure in ambiguous environments.
• Strong project-management and organizational skills.
• Bias toward action, experimentation, and shipping.
• Comfort working alongside highly technical teams.
• Ability to balance creative thinking with structured execution.
• Comfort operating independently without a detailed playbook.
• Experience in early-stage startups, consulting, or investment banking (valuable when paired with direct growth experience).
• Founding growth experience or growth experience at a company that scaled rapidly is a major plus.

A degree from a top-tier university is preferred.

What This Role Is Not

• Not a traditional sales or business-development role (e.g., AE, SDR, or quota-carrying positions).
• Not a strategy-only role where you build decks without execution.
• Pure product operations backgrounds without GTM ownership are less relevant.
• Not for candidates who are highly analytical but struggle to move from analysis to execution.

Success in the Role

In the first 90 days, a key objective is turning the company’s current GTM approach into a repeatable, scalable operating playbook. You’ll build on existing traction (10,000+ users in the first market), early growth data, experiments, partnerships, and an initial launch framework to create a more organized, measurable, and efficient system. The process should become faster and smarter with each new city launch.

Culture

The company operates in person five days per week from its Cow Hollow office in San Francisco. The team is small, highly collaborative, engineering-heavy, social, and fast-moving, with a high degree of autonomy and ownership. The culture blends technical intensity with a strong social and creative component, reflecting the consumer lifestyle product they’re building.

• Team traditions and benefits include free lunch and dinner, coffee and snacks, team off-sites, rooftop cocktail nights, launch trips, a beautiful office space, and an office dog.

Pay

Base salary: $100K–$130K, with potential flexibility for exceptional candidates. Competitive startup equity is also offered.

Schedule

• Location: Cow Hollow, San Francisco (five days per week in office).
• Travel: Approximately 2-3 week launch sprints in new U.S. cities.
• Employment: Full-time.

Visa: Open to qualifying visa transfers, with potential sponsorship flexibility for the right candidate.