---
title: 'Lifecycle Marketing Manager, SMB Ads at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/lifecycle-marketing-manager-smb-ads-openai-san-francisco-m8aqj5a5t9gf'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-05'
---

# Lifecycle Marketing Manager, SMB Ads at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $227k–$252k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-09-11
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/31f7b3d9-eb5f-4e70-98ab-9115dd153993

## Job description

## About the Team

OpenAI is building the next generation of advertising for an AI-powered world. As AI changes how people discover information, explore possibilities, and make decisions, we believe this presents a huge opportunity for small and medium-sized businesses to connect with customers in new ways. The SMB Ads Marketing team is building this opportunity from the ground up. We define how businesses discover OpenAI’s advertising platform, become successful advertisers, and grow their investment over time. Working closely with Product, Ads Engineering, Data Science, and Sales, we combine customer insight, rigorous experimentation, and fast execution to turn early opportunities into scalable growth.

## About the Role

We are seeking a Lifecycle Marketing Manager to build, own, and lead lifecycle programs for SMB advertisers at OpenAI. This is a zero-to-one opportunity to establish the strategy and programs that guide businesses from initial interest and their first campaign to sustained success and growth. You will set the lifecycle strategy, own the program roadmap and performance goals, and lead delivery from customer insight and journey design through launch, measurement, and iteration. Combining behavioral insights, experimentation, and personalized engagement across email, product experiences, education, and other channels, you will build programs that scale with the business. Success requires independent judgment, analytical depth, cross-functional leadership, and hands-on execution. In This Role, You Will

- Own the lifecycle program portfolio across prospect conversion, activation, retention, repeat spend, reactivation, and expansion.
- Map advertiser journeys using cohort analysis, product behavior, campaign performance, and customer feedback to identify high-impact growth opportunities.
- Build segmented, triggered journeys that connect advertiser needs, intent, readiness, and behavior to relevant messages and next steps.
- Lead prospect nurture and email acquisition programs. Coordinate audiences, retargeting, and conversion experiences with Growth Marketing.
- Launch onboarding and education programs that help advertisers create campaigns, understand performance, adopt capabilities, and grow their investment.
- Coordinate delivery across email, in-product and onsite experiences, retargeting, education, and sales engagement with channel and product teams.
- Test audiences, messaging, channels, timing, frequency, and offers. Use holdouts and downstream results to measure incremental customer impact.
- Define data signals, segmentation, instrumentation, automation, and measurement with Data Science, Marketing Operations, prospect intelligence teams, and Ads Engineering.
- Maintain high standards for journey quality, contact frequency, suppression, consent, and deliverability with operations and privacy partners.
- Improve activation, time to first campaign, retention, repeat spend, reactivation, and expansion. Scale effective programs and use AI to accelerate content, personalization, and analysis.

You Might Thrive in This Role If You

- Demonstrate a track record of building and leading lifecycle programs from strategy through execution, with measurable activation, retention, or customer-growth results.
- Translate customer behavior into effective engagement strategies through customer empathy, clear communication, and disciplined prioritization.
- Build behavioral segmentation and triggered programs using product and customer signals across multiple channels.
- Apply cohort analysis, funnel diagnostics, retention measurement, and experimental design to distinguish engagement from incremental customer outcomes.
- Bring hands-on experience with CRM and marketing automation platforms, such as Marketo or comparable tools, including journey logic, personalization, and quality assurance.
- Lead cross-functional programs with Product, Engineering, Data Science, Sales, and Marketing Operations, aligning priorities and driving delivery.
- Set strategy and launch programs in fast-moving environments while establishing repeatable processes and reliable measurement.
- Bring experience with SMBs, self-serve products, advertising, SaaS, marketplaces, fintech, or other high-volume customer journeys. Use AI thoughtfully to improve personalization and execution.

## Preferred Qualifications

- Experience building lifecycle programs for SMB advertisers or self-serve advertising platforms.
- Track record launching onboarding and education programs that accelerate first campaign creation and repeat spend.
- Experience connecting email, in-product messaging, retargeting, and sales engagement into coordinated customer journeys.
- Experience using holdout tests and cohort analysis to measure incremental retention and revenue impact.
- Hands-on experience establishing behavioral triggers, automation, and measurement for new lifecycle programs.
- Experience applying AI to improve personalization, content development, and campaign analysis.

Workplace & Location

- San Francisco, CA. This role requires a hybrid schedule with an in office requirement from Monday - Wednesday.

## About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. For additional information, please see [OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf). Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through [this form](https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA). No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this [link](https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241). [OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf) At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

## About OpenAI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.
- **Entity Type**: Private – structured as a nonprofit parent (OpenAI Foundation) governing a for-profit public benefit corporation (OpenAI Group). The company has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, signaling a potential future IPO.
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2015
- **Founders**: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, and others

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial intelligence research and deployment
- **Target customers**: B2B (enterprises via API and platform), B2C (ChatGPT users), and developers (API, open-source models)
- **Mission**: To ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI systems that are generally smarter than humans – benefits all of humanity.

## Products & Services
- **[ChatGPT](https://openai.com/chatgpt)**: Conversational AI assistant available via web and mobile, used by consumers and integrated into enterprise workflows.
- **[GPT-4 API](https://openai.com/product)**: Large language model accessed via API for developers to build AI-powered applications (text generation, summarization, code assistance, etc.).
- **[DALL-E](https://openai.com/dall-e-3)**: Image generation model that creates images from natural language descriptions.
- **[Whisper](https://openai.com/research/whisper)**: Open-source speech recognition system.
- **[OpenAI Agents](https://openai.com/)**: Emerging product category focused on autonomous AI agents that can perform tasks on behalf of users (announced June 2026).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed in the provided sources. Widely reported in the press at ~$300 billion as of early 2026 (post-funding round), but this figure is not confirmed by OpenAI’s official materials.
- **Key Metric**: Total funding exceeds $13 billion from Microsoft and other investors. The company has also confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC (see [openai.com](https://openai.com/) – “Confidential submission of draft S-1”).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Microsoft (strategic partner and largest investor), with additional participation from Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others.
- **Growth Signals**: Active hiring with 721 open roles posted; expansion into agent-based products; confidential IPO filing; continued deployment of frontier models.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-mover & brand recognition**: ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history, establishing OpenAI as the household name in generative AI.
- **Research leadership**: Consistently publishes cutting-edge research (GPT-4, DALL-E 3, Whisper, etc.) and attracts top AI talent.
- **Compute & infrastructure**: Exclusive partnership with Microsoft provides massive cloud computing resources (Azure) for training and inference.
- **Unique governance structure**: The nonprofit parent ensures mission alignment (AGI benefiting humanity) while the for-profit arm can raise capital and scale products.

## Strategic Focus
- **Safe AGI development**: Continued emphasis on safety research, alignment, and responsible deployment (e.g., safety systems, model provenance).
- **Enterprise expansion**: Growing ChatGPT Enterprise and API offerings for businesses.
- **Agentic AI**: Building autonomous agents that can “transform work” (announced June 2026).
- **IPO preparation**: Confidential S-1 filing indicates intent to go public, which will require increased financial transparency and governance maturity.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & values**: OpenAI’s stated values include “Humanity first,” “Act with humility,” “Feel the AGI,” and “Ship joy.” Operating principles emphasize agency, creativity, rapid iteration, and intense focus.
- **Benefits**: Competitive health insurance, mental healthcare support, 24-week paid birth-parent leave (plus 20 weeks for other parents), generous PTO, annual learning & development stipend, daily meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), and a domestic conference budget.
- **Work environment**: Hybrid/office-based (San Francisco headquarters). The company offers a residency program for researchers and engineers transitioning into AI.
- **Impact**: Employees work directly on frontier AI models that shape the industry and society. The mission-driven nature attracts talent passionate about AGI’s societal implications.

## Sources
1. [OpenAI About Page](https://openai.com/about/)
2. [OpenAI Careers Page](https://openai.com/careers/)
3. [OpenAI Job Search](https://openai.com/careers/search)
4. [OpenAI Homepage](https://openai.com/)

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