Sr. Director, Performance Creative

Be the first Senior Director of Performance Creative at an agency built by founders who have done this before.

Remote, US · Full-time · Reports to Adam Edwards and Ken Baker, co-founders

Who we are

Aftergrowth is a growth agency for mid-market brands, running digital media, performance creative and SEO & GEO. Our founders, Ken Baker and Adam Edwards, have done this before. They built Metric Theory from a one-bedroom apartment into one of the largest independent performance agencies in the country, won Ad Age’s #1 Best Place to Work along the way, and sold it to S4 Capital in 2020.

We started Aftergrowth because AI changed the job. Platforms now set the bids, pick the audience and write the fortieth headline, and they’re very good at it. But they’ll chase whatever number you hand them, whether or not it grows the business. The edge is in deciding what they learn from, what they aim at and what counts as a win. That’s the work we’re built around, and we’re hiring the people who do the steering.

How we work

• Own Your Outputs. AI can produce the first draft. You own whether it’s right.

• Live in the Frontier. AI takes on more of the execution every quarter, so you’ll keep retiring parts of your own job and turning what works into tools the whole team uses.

• Irreplaceably Human. The idea, the client relationship, the judgment call no model will make for you.

• Scoreboard. We judge the work by client outcomes, not volume.

Why join now

You’ll be one of our key foundational hires. Our first client starts this month, with more coming soon. That means more say in what gets built, how we pitch and how we deliver, plus a direct line to the two people who make the decisions.

Concretely: weekly working sessions with Adam on growth strategy, a seat next to Ken in new-business pitches, and input on comp and hiring for your own team.

What you’ll own

Performance creative at Aftergrowth, end to end. AI can now produce a hundred ad variants before lunch. Your job is deciding which ideas deserve to exist and proving which ones work.

• The clients. You own the performance creative relationships, from the first brief to the QBR, and you’re in the room when we pitch new ones.

• The approach. You build the strategy and methodology that connect creative concepts and testing to revenue, and you decide how Aftergrowth’s performance creative approach evolves.

• The machine. You own the roadmap for our creative agents and skills, and you choose the partners and tools we build on.

• The work. You stay close to the briefs, design and animation for our founding clients, and you review and sharpen the concepts before they ship.

• The team. You hire it, build it and lead it.

What you bring

• 7+ years in creative, with 3+ in an agency

• Hands-on experience across design, animation, production and strategy. You don’t need to be the best at all four, but you should be able to direct and critique each of them.

• Comfort tying creative concepts and iterations to the numbers that matter: revenue, conversions and CPA

• A portfolio of ad concepts you conceptualized and delivered for channels like Meta, TikTok, YouTube and CTV

• The ability to connect creative work and testing to a paid media strategy

• Experience hiring and leading successful teams

• Executive presentation skills and experience

• Fluency using AI to automate workflows, mock up wireframes and designs, and build ads, while still owning concept ideation

A week in the life

Three months in.

Monday

• Morning: Weekly creative performance check. One client’s best-performing concept is fatiguing on Meta, and you need a read on what to test next.

• Afternoon: Run our concept-variation skill on the winning angle, then cut its 30 variants to the five worth making.

Tuesday

• Morning: Pipeline and staffing huddle with Adam and Ken, then prep next week’s client onboarding: creative audit and a first round of test hypotheses.

• Afternoon: Final-round interview for a motion designer, who walks you through a portfolio piece and tells you what the numbers did after it launched.

Wednesday

• Morning: QBR with a client’s VP of Marketing: revenue first, then what the creative tests taught us, then next quarter’s two bets.

• Afternoon: Sync with the digital media lead. The creative angles that win in paid social become the briefs for next month’s CTV tests.

Thursday

• Morning: Concept review with the team. You pressure-test three directions against the brief and send two back.

• Afternoon: Build time on a skill that turns a winning concept into a full set of channel-ready formats, so the team ships in hours instead of days.

Friday

• Morning: Evaluate a new partner tool for video production, and decide whether it earns a place in the stack.

• Afternoon: Ship v1 of your skill and demo it at the team show-and-tell.

Location and travel

Remote, US. We have hubs in San Francisco and San Diego. If you’re near one, great. If not, this role stays remote. Expect to get together in person about once a quarter, plus client and pitch travel as needed.

Compensation

$125,000 – $175,000 base salary, plus a performance-based bonus.

Benefits

• Health and dental

• Vision and a 401(k)

• Flexible PTO

• On the roadmap: 401(k) matching, a wellness stipend and more as we grow