Head of SMB Ads Marketing

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure the responsible and widespread adoption of artificial intelligence. In support of that mission, the Marketing team helps deeply understand customer audiences and market dynamics, influence the development of the right products, build sustainable and customer-aligned monetization models, and drive awareness, adoption, and usage across OpenAI’s products and platform.
We take a data-driven approach to understand markets, develop monetization strategies, and uncover customer needs that shape product strategy and messaging. We partner closely with Sales, Partnerships, Product, Engineering, Research, Comms, and Design to deliver a cohesive end-to-end customer experience and lead go-to-market efforts for new product launches across channels.

We are hiring a Head of SMB Ads Marketing to define and scale OpenAI’s marketing strategy for small and medium-sized business advertisers globally. This leader will own how SMBs discover, evaluate, adopt, and grow with OpenAI’s advertising platform.

This is a highly strategic and hands-on leadership role at the intersection of product marketing, growth marketing, demand generation, lifecycle marketing, and sales enablement. You will build the SMB advertiser growth engine from the ground up—developing segmentation, positioning, onboarding journeys, education programs, partner programs (including agencies), acquisition campaigns, treatments and retention strategies that help millions of businesses unlock value through OpenAI’s self-service ads platform.

You will partner closely with Product, Sales, Partnerships, Growth, Finance, Data Science, and Operations to create a durable SMB business that scales efficiently while maintaining a high-quality advertiser and user experience.

This role is ideally based in San Francisco, CA, with a hybrid schedule of three days per week in the office.

• Define the end-to-end SMB advertiser marketing strategy across acquisition, activation, retention, expansion, and advocacy for OpenAI’s self-service ads platform.

• Build the SMB advertiser segmentation framework, identifying priority audiences by business size, industry, sophistication, geography, and growth potential.

• Develop positioning and messaging that translates OpenAI’s advertising products and self-service tools into clear, compelling business outcomes for SMB owners, operators, and marketers.

• Lead self-serve growth initiatives that drive advertiser sign-ups, onboarding completion, first campaign launch, repeat spend, and long-term platform adoption.

• Create scalable lifecycle marketing programs across email, in-product surfaces, education, webinars, and community channels.

• Partner with Product teams to improve advertiser onboarding flows, campaign creation tools, billing journeys, reporting dashboards, and measurement UX.

• Build demand generation programs across paid, owned, and partner channels (including agencies) to efficiently grow the SMB advertiser base.

• Develop educational content and thought leadership that helps SMBs learn modern AI-powered marketing best practices and become successful advertisers on the platform.

• Establish retention and reactivation strategies that improve cohort health, advertiser ROI, and long-term spend growth.

• Develop an approach to define when and how higher-value SMBs transition from self-service to assisted or managed motions.

• Build scaled assisted SMB management and upsell motions

• Own core funnel metrics including CAC, activation rate, time-to-first-campaign, repeat advertiser rate, retention, and LTV/CAC efficiency.

• Provide customer insight and market feedback to inform roadmap priorities for self-service ad products, tooling, automation, and measurement.

• Hire and lead a high-performing team across disciplines over time.

• Have 12+ years of experience in growth marketing, product marketing, performance marketing, or SMB go-to-market leadership.

• Have built or scaled SMB self-service advertising ecosystems at companies such as Google Ads, Meta, Amazon Ads, Shopify, Intuit, Square, HubSpot, Yelp, TikTok, or similar platforms.

• Deeply understand SMB customer behavior, including acquisition economics, self-serve funnels, onboarding friction, and retention dynamics.

• Have experience marketing self-service SaaS or advertising platforms where ease of use, conversion, and retention are critical.

• Have strong product instincts and can partner closely with PMs and engineers to improve conversion and user experience.

• Are fluent in performance marketing concepts including campaign setup, targeting, bidding, attribution, and ROI measurement.

• Have experience leading lifecycle marketing and CRM programs at scale.

• Are highly analytical and comfortable using experimentation, funnel analysis, and cohort modeling to drive decisions.

• Can simplify complex advertising products into clear narratives for non-expert business owners.

• Thrive in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where you are building new functions from scratch.

• Are an excellent people leader who can attract top talent and raise the quality bar quickly.

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.

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.

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