At NerdWallet, our mission is to bring clarity to all of life’s financial decisions so people can move forward with confidence. We’re building a team of exceptional Nerds in an inclusive, flexible, and candid culture where you’re encouraged to grow, take smart risks, and be yourself. Whether you work remotely or in an office, we support how you thrive and invest in your well-being, development, and impact.

We're looking for a paid media lead with a history of success in SEM, youtube, and display, to drive customer acquisition across multiple financial services verticals. Experience driving marketing results with Claude or Chat GPT is highly desirable.

This is both a hands-on and strategic role: you'll build the roadmap, launch and optimize campaigns , and partner with analytics, business, creative, and engineering to continuously drive value for our customers and business. Success here requires strong data/creative/ monetization skills, a high degree of initiative, and a vision for paid marketing tactics and experiences in the age of AI.

This role reports to the Managing Director.

Where you can make an impact

Strategy & Campaign Ownership

Own paid marketing strategy, execution, and performance across multiple verticals, aligning campaigns to each vertical's growth targets, funnel dynamics, and audience needs

Build campaign structures across SEM, youtube, display, Open AI, and other platforms as needed

Set objectives, bidding strategy, audience approach, budget allocation, and conversion events per campaign

Manage campaigns end-to-end: setup, QA, pacing, troubleshooting, optimization

Build testing plans for new verticals, bidding strategies, conversion events, creative angles, and funnel experiences

AI Utilization

Use AI tools to enhance and accelerate traditional marketing functions

Use AI as your own personal agency - building high quality creative, data insights, and landing pages, etc to overcome blockers and limited resources

Combine your own deep understanding of paid marketing with AI tools for novel and innovative purposes.

Optimization & Performance

Monitor marketing performance and diagnose CTR, CVR, and Revenue and monetization issues, data/tracking issues, funnel friction, monetization problems, and/or lead quality.

Make budget and pacing calls based on performance trends and business priorities

Stay current on platform, algorithm, privacy, and ad product changes

Reporting & Stakeholder Communication

Own recurring performance reporting — results, trends, learnings, risks, next steps

Translate platform performance into business impact for vertical leads and leadership

Communicate tracking issues, data discrepancies, and testing results clearly and proactively

Data, Tracking & Measurement

Partner with data, analytics, and engineering teams to define measurement needs and map new conversion events

Troubleshoot discrepancies between platform and backend data (attribution, event firing, duplicates, timing)

Help build measurement frameworks that optimize toward lead quality and business outcomes, not just volume

Creative Strategy

Lead creative strategy across verticals: messaging angles, hooks, scripts, static/video/UGC concepts

Write creative briefs covering business goal, audience, value prop, and key claims

Review assets for clarity and platform fit; give feedback through concept, script, and production stages

Build creative testing roadmaps and turn results into next-round recommendations

Landing Page & Funnel Strategy

Evaluate landing pages and funnels for message match, conversion flow, and drop-off

Recommend and support tests across landing pages, advertorials, lead forms, quizzes, and pre-qualification flows

Ensure creative, landing pages, and tracking are aligned before launch

Platform Partnerships & Competitive Research

Manage relationships with platform reps; evaluate their recommendations against NerdWallet's goals and data quality

Track competitor creative, offers, and funnel approaches; feed insights back into strategy

Your experience

5+ years of paid search experience, ideally in lead generation.