Soda Data→
Performance Marketer (Paid Ads + Creative) at Soda Data in Chicago, IL
Skills
Job Description
Data quality is the bottleneck of the AI era. Every Fortune 500 is trying to solve it. We're the team they call.
Soda is the data quality layer for Disney, Ralph Lauren, CBRE, HelloFresh, 2K Games, and Nubank. Our open-source engine, Soda Core, is used by companies like Tesla, Slack, Adyen, Walmart, and JPMC. The category is growing fast because AI doesn't work on bad data.
We're hiring one person to own paid acquisition end to end.
About Us
Soda's mission is to monitor the world's decisions. We're building the first Data & AI performance monitoring platform that spans data collection to automated decision-making.
The Role
Not to manage an agency. Not to approve creative someone else made. You write the ad, you make the asset, you build the landing page, you launch it, you own the budget, and you read the numbers on Monday and kill what didn't work.
You'll join the Growth team reporting to a co-founder.
What you might call yourself. Performance marketer, paid media manager, paid acquisition lead, demand gen manager, growth marketer, creative strategist, media buyer, or the person at a startup who just ended up running the ads. We don't care what's on your CV. You need to have run B2B paid yourself and you need to have made the creative, and most people have only done one.
Who this is for. People who have personally run enterprise B2B ads at a company nobody had heard of yet. You know what a $40 click feels like, you know why the creative that won on LinkedIn dies on Reddit, and you have opinions about it that you earned by losing money that mattered.
If your last job was allocating budget across channels and reviewing what an agency shipped, this isn't it. If you've been making the ads yourself because it was faster than briefing someone, this is it.
What You'll Do
Own paid acquisition end to end: LinkedIn, Meta, Google, Reddit, , ChatGpt, X, and whatever you can prove works.
Make the creative. Copy, static, video, landing pages. You are the studio, and AI is how you get to twenty variants instead of two.
Run a real testing cadence: hypothesis, ship, read, kill. Volume of tests is the job; most of them will lose and that's the point.
Own the budget and the number. Pipeline and qualified meetings, not impressions.
Work with the founders, customer engineers, and customers on what Soda actually says to the market. Your opinion matters here.
You've run enterprise B2B paid at a startup or growth-stage technical company: data, infrastructure, developer tools, security, or observability. Long cycles, a buying committee, high contract values - and no brand pull to coast on. Running paid for a company everyone has heard of, with a big budget and an agency, is a different job to running it for one nobody knows yet on a budget that doesn't forgive waste. We need the second one.
Experiment obsessed: the testing cadence is the job. Tell us how many tests you ran last quarter, the last five and what each one was trying to learn, which ones you were wrong about, and what you killed. Most of them should have lost.
You make the creative: send us ads you personally made, with what they cost and what they returned. The most important line in this ad.
AI-first: you use frontier models to produce and iterate creative at volume, and you can tell us specifically where AI made it better and where it made it worse.
You own the budget: you've had spend authority and hit a number with it.
Enough technical range to be unblocked: landing pages, tracking, conversion APIs, UTMs, a CRM. Nothing waits on an engineer.
Enough data fluency to be credible: you're selling to data engineers and CDOs. You don't have to be one, but you can't sound like you've never met one.
Clear written English: most of the job is words on a page that someone decides about in two seconds.
Good to Have
Data quality, data management, or data observability specifically.
You've built the attribution model as well as run the ads.
Founder or first-marketer background where nobody was going to do it for you.
You were the first paid hire somewhere and built the function from zero.
Compensation: $120,000-$130,000 / €110,000-€120,000 per year + equity - the same band wherever you live. We don't discount for geography.
Fully remote (US or EU-based), with offices in Brooklyn.
All the tokens you need, across all frontier models.
Real budget, real ownership, no micromanagement.
Colleagues in 12+ countries, and the local equivalent of PTO, retirement, and medical cover.
Our Values
We value freedom with responsibility, transparency, and a growth mindset. We avoid politics, have no tolerance for dishonesty, and value open and direct communication without judgment. We proactively bring up and address potential issues before they become critical, and we overcommunicate frequently. Working at Soda, you will have full autonomy to make impactful decisions.
❤️ Why you will love to join Soda
- Be part of a transformation: data quality is having its moment, and we're at the front of it.
- Ownership from day one: if you see a bottleneck, you remove it.
- International culture: colleagues in 12+ countries.
- Work on your own terms: fully remote, flexible hours.
- Paid the same wherever you are: one band for the US and Europe, no geographic discount.
- You own a channel, not a task list: the paid function is yours to build from the ground up.
- Budget to test with, and no committee between you and shipping an ad.
😡 What you might not love
- Rapidly changing priorities: our roadmap can pivot quickly. It's a fast-paced environment with a LOT of work to be done.
- Flexibility required: you will have to learn new things all the time.
- No agency, no designer to hand things to: if you don't make it, it doesn't exist.
- Judged on pipeline, not on the work: a beautiful campaign that sourced nothing is a failure.
Hiring Process
- 15-minute phone screen - with a founder
- Short assignment
- Craft deep dive (90 min)
- Culture fit (1 hour)
We answer every application, and every candidate hears back within 3-5 days of each step. If it's not a hell yes, it's a no, and we'll tell you quickly and kindly.