Lifecycle and Retention Lead

Job Description

Job Description

Job Description

About the role

We are looking for a senior, highly analytical Lifecycle Marketing leader to build and own our lifecycle strategy end-to-end—from a customer’s first moments with us through activation, repeat usage, and long-term retention. You’ll be responsible for designing the journeys, triggers, and messaging that move customers from “interested” to “activated” to “habitual,” using a combination of lifecycle channels (email, in-app, push/SMS as appropriate) and in-product experiences. This role is ideal for someone who loves digging into funnels and cohort behavior, translating insights into crisp hypotheses, and then shipping experiments that measurably improve conversion and retention.

You’ll work in lockstep with Product, Engineering, and Data to ensure the foundations are strong: clean event tracking, clear customer states, reliable segmentation, and trustworthy measurement. Beyond building the lifecycle “machine,” you’ll be the internal owner of churn monitoring—spotting leading indicators, diagnosing root causes, and partnering cross-functionally to address them through product improvements and targeted lifecycle programs. This is a very senior individual contributor role to start, with the opportunity to build a lifecycle/CRM team as our team grows.

What you'll do

• Own our end-to-end lifecycle strategy, from first-touch onboarding to retention, reactivation, and winback.
• Partner with Product to improve conversion and activation through in-product journeys (nudges, education, paywalls/prompts where relevant) and optimized flows.
• Build and run lifecycle messaging programs across email, push, SMS, and in-app (channel mix based on product + compliance).
• Create a segmentation and personalization framework (behavioral, cohort-based, and value-based) to drive relevance and reduce message fatigue.
• Establish a lifecycle experimentation engine: A/B tests, holdouts, cohort tests, and measurement tied to real retention and churn outcomes.
• Lead churn monitoring and root-cause analysis: cohort retention curves, leading indicators, cancellation reasons (if applicable), and qualitative feedback loops.
• Define lifecycle “north star” behaviors and next-best-action strategies to drive repeat value.
• Collaborate with Data/Eng on event tracking, customer states, and data pipelines so lifecycle programs are reliable and measurable.
• Build the lifecycle roadmap, operating cadence, and—over time—hire and scale lifecycle specialists (CRM ops, copy, analytics, marketing ops).

• 5-10 years in lifecycle/CRM/retention at a consumer tech/fintech/subscription company.
• Proven ability to move activation, retention, and churn through structured lifecycle programs and product collaboration.
• Highly analytical: comfortable with cohorts, funnels, experimentation design, and interpreting retention curves (SQL is a plus).
• Practical technical fluency: you can partner with engineers on event schemas, data quality, and journey logic.
• Strong copy + messaging instincts (you don’t need to be a copywriter, but you can set direction and quality).
• Experience building lifecycle from scratch: tooling, templates, QA, deliverability, governance, and measurement.

• Hands-on experience with Customer.io / Klaviyo (or similar), plus Segment/CDPs.
• Experience building retention loops in fintech-like products (trust, education, frequency, habit formation).