Manager, Paid Social

Smalls is on a mission to make nine lives ten, building a brand that genuinely improves the lives of cats and their people. Today, many of the cat people who find Smalls find us on Meta. It's our largest acquisition channel and we’re looking for someone to fully own it. You will fully own Paid Social performance from top to bottom. You’ll drive profitable growth by setting a sharp channel strategy and executing it in platform. You’ll be expected to run a highly efficient engine, make smart bets, and communicate performance insights clearly at all levels of the business. This isn't a role for someone who wants to direct an agency from a dashboard, and it isn't a first time job.This is a hands-on, in-platform role for a seasoned operator who treats Meta as a craft: you know how the auction actually behaves, you have strong opinions about account structure and placement mix, and you can tell the difference between real performance signals and noise. WHAT YOU'LL DO: - Own the channel end to end. You’ll drive budget, pacing, forecasting, campaign architecture, in-channel creative strategy, bidding, audiences, placement mix — the full stack of decisions that drive our largest paid channel. You'll be accountable for acquiring high quality customers at efficient CACs. - Optimize for customer quality, not just cost. You'll be responsible for driving against both volume & quality targets — conversions, customer retention, LTV — and you'll tune targeting, creative selection, and bidding toward cohorts that stay, even when that makes the topline CAC number look worse in the short run. - Bring the channel in house. Lead the transition from our hybrid agency model to full internal ownership, leading hands-on account management with ad ops support. - Own creative performance in-channel. Collaborate closely with the Growth Creative Strategist on translating our creative strategy to Meta — determine how we bring our value props to life, testing strategy, and the audience × message × format judgment behind those calls. You'll feed your channel's signals back into the system so wins travel beyond your channel. - Own the measurement, skeptically. Keep our signal quality strong (CAPI, event match quality, AEM), reconcile platform reporting against internal attribution, and contribute to incrementality work — geo holdouts, lift studies — so we're spending against what really drives performance, not what Meta says is real. WHO YOU ARE You've run Meta at scale. You've personally managed seven-figure monthly Meta budgets, ideally at a DTC subscription or ecommerce brand, with deep hands on keys experience, not through an agency. You know firsthand how differently the platform behaves at that level of spend than at a fraction of it. You have experience with subscription business and understand the dynamics you instinctively evaluate performance through retention and LTV, not just cost per conversion. You're rigorous about reporting & tech. You design clean tests and you can tell a genuine performance signal from attribution noise. CAPI, EMQ, attribution windows, and view-through dynamics are familiar ground. You have in-channel creative judgment. You understand why an ad wins for a given audience in a given placement, and you can operate within a shared creative strategy, making it perform in your channel without needing to own the whole system. You communicate with clarity. You can explain a CPM spike to the exec team without hiding behind jargon, and you say what you think the account needs, directly. You're a cat person. You care about cats and the people who love them, and you're genuinely excited to build for this community. WHAT YOU’LL LOVE ABOUT US: - Mission-Driven Company: We love cats and we're here to make nine lives ten. - People-Driven Company: We treat our people like people; we're committed to Smalls, and we work hard but also respect everyone’s lives outside of work. - Data-Driven Culture: We love using data to guide decision-making wh…