Senior Performance Marketing Manager

About NewsBreak

Local life runs on local information. What happened down the street? Who can fix this? Where should we go tonight? NewsBreak started in 2015 to answer these questions, and today more than 40 million people a month rely on us to follow what’s going on in their zip code.

Three platforms with one vision: powering local life. Led by founder and CEO Jeff Zheng, NewsBreak is our local life and news platform; Nearby AI connects people with local businesses; and NDot AI helps publishers and creators grow and earn.

Building for the long term. A $115 million Series C made us a unicorn in 2021, and we keep investing in our people. We’re Great Place to Work® certified and named to Fast Company ’s Best Workplaces for Innovators (2025) and Fortune ’s Best Workplaces in the Bay Area™ (2026).

Everyone makes an impact. Whether you write code, shape products, tell our story, or run the business, we want people who own projects end to end, stay curious, and speak up. Join us.

Learn more at: NewsBreak, Nearby AI, NDot AI

Why this role exists

The team has a Lead, and direction is well set — the agentic system is their initiative. But that same person also heads the part-time jobs vertical. Two significant roles, one person's bandwidth means the time available for paid growth is limited. Day-to-day operations are covered by a colleague who is new to growth — at this budget scale, incrementality judgment, bidding strategy, and experiment design sit beyond their current experience. What's missing isn't direction; it's an experienced operator running the function full-time. That colleague will continue on execution under you.

That explains the present state: no incrementality testing has ever been run, a hyper-local product bids uniformly nationwide, angle tests run without pre-registered sample sizes or stopping rules, and close to half the team still performs work the platforms have automated. Conservatively, eight figures of annual efficiency sits unclaimed here.

Platform automation has absorbed most manual optimization headroom — the ceiling isn't operational precision. Experiment design and analytical judgment are the core skills; knowing the Meta interface is table stakes.

What you'll own

Cross-channel budget reallocation grounded in incrementality

Standardizing how angles get tested — the most concrete gap today: pre-registered sample sizes and power calculations, success criteria and stopping rules set before launch, a consistent control, a structured test log, and strict separation of message tests from creative tests (never vary both). Testing happens today, but conclusions are of uncertain reliability: the true hit rate is unknown, and winners may have been killed while noise was kept

Guardrails and supervision for the agentic bidding system : approval thresholds, audit logs, rollback, enforced holdouts, and when to trust it versus intervene. The Lead sets system direction; this role owns rollout and risk control

Rollout of geo-tiered bidding

Extracting platform support — at this spend level you should have rep support, lift studies, and alpha access

Rebalancing the team: nearly half of it still does work the platforms have automated

What we're looking for

7+ years in app UA, having independently run $30M+ per year — small-budget experience doesn't transfer; this bar is firm

You can answer: “Given a system that reallocates budget automatically, how do you stop it from moving spend toward zero-incrementality inventory?”

You've cut spend that looked good in the dashboard but wasn't incremental

You design your own experiments, including power calculations and stopping rules

You've managed 4+ people, including at least one non-buying function (analytics, creative, or engineering)

Industry open

First 90 days

Audit optimization events: how much budget sits on installs versus downstream value

With the Growth DS, translate the first incrementality readout into actual budget shifts

Stand up the two-layer testing framework and ring-fence an exploration budget

The US base salary range for this full-time position is listed below. Pay may vary based on a number of factors including job-related skills, level, experience, geographic location and relevant education or training. At NewsBreak, we design our overall rewards package to attract top talents. Depending on the position, the role may also be eligible for discretionary bonus and options. Your recruiter can share more details during the hiring process. Annual Base Pay Range $100,000 — $250,000 USD

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