Senior Director, Performance Marketing

About the Role

Own performance marketing for our consumer business across Google and Meta end-to-end, including strategy, execution, creative, and optimization. This is a high-leverage individual contributor role with no direct reports and full accountability. You'll direct an 8-figure annual budget as if it were your own capital, using AI-native tools to build, test, and scale campaigns, landing pages, and creative at a speed no traditional team can match.

About Nerdy

Nerdy (NYSE: NRDY) - the company behind Varsity Tutors - is redrawing the blueprint of learning. Our Live + AI™ platform fuses real-time human expertise with proprietary generative-AI systems, setting a new bar for measurable academic impact at global scale.

We recruit the kind of technologists and operators you’d bet on as solo founders—people who turn ambiguous problems into shipping code, iterate faster than markets move, and compound their advantage with every data point. In an era where great employees can deliver 10-times the leverage of the merely good, we back those who play to win.

How We Compete

• AI-Native at every level: From the CEO to day-one hires, everyone builds and ships with generative AI. If you’re not wielding AI, you’re not done.
• Entrepreneurial velocity: Move at founder speed, prototype in hours, and measure in real user outcomes. Slow teams die.
• Free-market rigor: Ideas rise or fall on merit and results—no committees, no politics, no cap on upside.
• Full-stack ownership: You design, build, and run what you ship; accountability is a feature, not a bug.
• Reward for contribution: Pay rises with impact, not years. Outstanding results earn outsized rewards. We evaluate both what you achieve and how you achieve it: living our leadership principles and using AI effectively are formally measured and rewarded.
• Relentless exploration: Push the frontier of generative AI in live learning and—because only the paranoid survive—questioning every legacy assumption along the way.
• Is Apolitical: You stay focused on mission-aligned outcomes, not distractions or unrelated causes.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree preferred.
• 10+ years of hands-on paid media experience, including direct ownership of >$10MM in annual spend across Google & Meta as well as experience in other emerging channels.
• Proven track record of building, launching, and scaling campaigns end-to-end with minimal support. You don't hand off strategy to an analyst or creative to an agency; you build it yourself, faster than either could.
• Top 1% AI-native marketer: daily, fluent use of generative AI across the full workflow: ad copy and creative generation, landing page and CRO builds, audience/insight analysis, bid and budget optimization scripts, and workflow automation. You can point to real campaigns or pages you've built primarily through AI-assisted workflows, not just AI-assisted brainstorming.
• Working proficiency with AI-native builder tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Vercel, Netlify, Supabase, etc) to independently ship landing pages, automations, and reporting tools without waiting on engineering.
• Strong quantitative fluency: comfortable in Excel/Sheets and basic SQL, building your own attribution, LTV, and CAC/ROAS models rather than waiting on BI.
• Deep understanding of conversion rate optimization. You can independently hypothesize, build, test, and ship landing page variants.
• Experience partnering with Product, Engineering, and BI on tracking, tagging, attribution, and API/data integrations.
• Highly organized self-starter who thrives without a team beneath them. You scale through leverage (AI, automation, tooling) rather than headcount.

Responsibilities

• Own paid media strategy and execution end-to-end across Google and Meta.
• Personally build and iterate ad creative, copy, and landing pages using AI-native tools, cutting the traditional handoff cycle between strategy, creative, and dev out of the workflow.
• Run continuous CRO experimentation on landing pages and funnels: hypothesize, build, A/B test, and ship winning variants independently.
• Build and maintain your own performance dashboards; track CAC, ROAS, LTV, and channel-level efficiency, and act on insights same-day rather than waiting on reporting cycles.
• Design and deploy automations for bid management, reporting, QA, and campaign operations to scale output without adding headcount.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, and BI on tracking, tagging, and API integrations needed for personalization, attribution, and automation.
• Manage channel budgets with founder-level ownership & treat spend efficiency and incrementality as if it were your own capital.
• Continuously evaluate and adopt new AI tools and workflows to keep Nerdy's paid media motion at the frontier of what's technically possible.
• Report on performance, experiments, and roadmap directly to leadership.

Benefits

• Competitive Compensation & Advancement: Market-leading salary paired with clear promotion pathways and equity (RSUs)—become an owner in our success.
• Retirement Made Simple: 401(k) plan with company match and immediate vesting.
• Remote-First Culture: Embrace flexibility across time zones and working styles to attract top talent and meet learners where they are.
• Flexible Time Off: Recharge on your terms, ensuring maximum productivity.
• Continuous Learning: Access an all-inclusive learning membership for you and your household, including 1:1 tutoring hours, unlimited on-demand classes, and our full suite of learning products and services.
• Supercharge with AI: Leverage cutting-edge AI tools to accelerate your workflow.
• Health Coverage: Medical, dental, vision, life, STD & LTD plans plus strong maternity, paternity, and adoption leaves—numerous options for you and your family.