Lifecycle Marketing Manager

About the role Sleeper is where millions of sports fans play fantasy, make picks, and follow the games together. We've built a product people love — and now we're building the lifecycle program to match it. This is a rare zero-to-one role, embedded directly with our product team. Every automated journey — onboarding, activation, retention, win-back — is yours to design and build. You'll own the strategy and the execution, from segmentation logic to the copy that ships. You'll sit with product because lifecycle is product here: the moments that matter happen in the app, and your work shapes how users discover, adopt, and stick with what we build. What you'll do - Build out and optimize our lifecycle program in Braze — canvases for onboarding, activation, retention, and reactivation across push, email, and in-app. - Strengthen email as a channel. Own email deliverability end to end: domain warm-up, list hygiene, and engagement-based sending. - Own segmentation and targeting. Define audiences from behavioral data, and partner with data and engineering to get the events and attributes you need instrumented. - Run real experiments. Holdouts, incrementality, and A/B tests — measure lift, not vanity metrics. - Drive lifecycle for tentpole moments — season kickoffs, competitions, and product launches — partnering closely with PMs, design, and marketing. - Set the operating standards: naming conventions, QA, frequency capping, and how we decide what's worth sending. What we're looking for - 3-5 years in lifecycle, CRM, or growth marketing, with meaningful ownership of a consumer program. - Deep hands-on Braze experience (or comparable: Iterable, Airship, Customer.io http://Customer.io) — you've built multi-step, branching journeys yourself, not just briefed them. - Strong grasp of email deliverability — sender reputation, authentication, and engagement-based sending. Bonus if you've personally run a domain warm-up or deliverability recovery. - Analytically rigorous. Comfortable in the data, designing holdouts, and telling incremental lift from correlation. - A builder's bias. You're energized by a blank slate and can go from strategy to shipped without waiting for a team. - Clear writer. You can write a push notification that gets tapped and an email that gets opened. - Collaborative with product and engineering — you can scope an instrumentation ask and see it through. Bonus points - Experience with in-app messaging and push, not just email - Experience in — or genuine passion/ curiosity for — sports, fantasy, DFS, gaming, or another real-money/regulated consumer product - Familiarity with responsible-gaming or compliance-aware messaging - SQL, and comfort working directly with a data warehouse - You're a sports fan who actually uses products like ours Why this role You won't be optimizing someone else's program — you'll be defining ours. High autonomy, a direct line to the product team, and measurable impact on activation, retention, and revenue.