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Traffic (User Acquisition) Team Lead
Contract type
Ongoing
Work mode
Remote · Worldwide
Experience
Mid-level · 3+ years
Job description
A player-coach Traffic/User Acquisition Team Lead role at ScholarshipOwl, owning and scaling paid (PPC) and affiliate user acquisition while managing and coaching a team of PPC and Affiliate Managers. The role combines hands-on campaign, tracking and partner-economics work with team leadership and budget ownership.
At a glance
- Employment
- Full-time
- Work mode
- Remote · Worldwide
What you'll do
- Act as a hands-on "player-coach," mentoring the Affiliate and PPC team while setting clear KPIs, testing roadmaps, and accountability standards.
- Conduct structured performance reviews with each team member and ensure clear ownership of priorities and deliverables.
- Update adjacent team leads and relevant stakeholders on performance, risks, opportunities, and changes to projections.
- Manage and dynamically allocate multi-channel acquisition budgets across PPC and Affiliate networks based on real-time CAC, ROAS, and LTV.
- Guide the team's daily execution—from PPC bidding and creative testing to negotiating high-leverage affiliate deals and scaling new traffic sources.
- Own the math behind customer acquisition, monitoring full-funnel conversion rates, payback periods, and delivering accurate weekly forecasts.
- Maintain strict attribution accuracy across tracking platforms (GA4, Mixpanel, TUNE, etc.) and aggressively eliminate click fraud, bot traffic, and budget waste.
What we're looking for
- 3+ years of professional performance marketing / user acquisition experience, with at least 1+ year in a hands-on PPC role, 1+ year in hands-on affiliate management, and 1+ year managing or leading a growth/traffic team.
- Proven ability to balance strategic leadership, team communication, and coaching with direct execution—pulling reports, analyzing campaign mechanics, and troubleshooting ad accounts alongside your team.
- Demonstrated track record managing meaningful acquisition budgets and making disciplined, performance-based capital allocation decisions.
- Strong working knowledge of PPC campaign management, keyword bidding, creative testing, and paid media optimization.
- Deep understanding of partner economics, how to structure commercially attractive deals, and broad awareness of major players and developments across the UA ecosystem.
- In-depth understanding of full-funnel performance metrics, including CAC/CPA, conversion rates, payback periods, ROAS, and LTV.
- Demonstrated ability to evaluate traffic quality and actively diagnose issues such as click fraud, attribution hijacking, bot traffic, poor targeting, or low-intent sources.
- Hands-on experience with affiliate tracking and traffic-management platforms (e.g., TUNE, Affise, Everflow) and product analytics tools (e.g., Mixpanel, GA4).
- Strong analytical and quantitative foundation, with the ability to independently query data, segment performance, uncover hidden patterns, and identify incremental growth opportunities.
- Clear, direct communication style with the ability to simplify complex data, while remaining completely transparent and honest when performance misses targets.
- Composed, objective demeanor during unexpected performance drops, combined with a natural curiosity to dig beneath surface-level explanations.
- Intellectual humility to challenge existing assumptions (including your own) and the operational discipline to cut low-value or unprofitable initiatives early.
Nice to have
- Proficiency in writing SQL queries to pull, aggregate, and analyze raw data independently.
- Basic programming or scripting experience to automate repetitive workflows.
- Hands-on experience building custom dashboards or automated reporting solutions.
- Strong familiarity with multi-touch attribution models and structured experimentation frameworks.
- Experience deploying modern AI prospecting, research, and workflow tools (e.g., Clay, automated web scrapers, LLMs for copy/data analysis).
- Track record of managing PPC and affiliate acquisition simultaneously while scaling a user acquisition function.
- Experience discovering, validating, and scaling brand-new acquisition channels or traffic sources from scratch.
- Direct industry experience within EdTech, freemium subscription models, lead generation, or Gen Z-focused consumer marketplaces.
- An active personal network of affiliate partners, traffic brokers, and direct publishers.
- Proven history of attending relevant industry conferences and converting them into commercial partnerships.
- Degree or professional qualification in Marketing, Business, Economics, Statistics, Data, or a related field (hands-on track record prioritized over formal education).
Your team
Traffic / User Acquisition team
A dedicated team of PPC and Affiliate Managers.
Apply
Direct apply at ScholarshipOwl
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About ScholarshipOwl
The largest scholarship marketplace in the U.S.
ScholarshipOwl is the largest scholarship marketplace in the U.S., connecting over 14 million Gen Z students with private scholarships — and the brands that power them. It is powered by AI technology that simplifies scholarship discovery, streamlines the application process, and delivers measurable results for both students and partners.
Mission
To make education financing more accessible and engaging, while giving brands a way to connect with the next generation.
Key facts
- Scholarship marketplace / EdTech
- Connects over 14 million Gen Z students with private scholarships
- Powered by AI technology for scholarship discovery and application
- Fully remote with a global team
What they value
- Outcomes over hours worked
- Curiosity and bold experimentation
- Ownership and high impact