Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Growth Lifecycle Lead role stands out in SaaS because it sits where product-led growth meets platform building. Rather than focusing only on campaigns, the remit spans the owned-channel systems that enable consistent activation and retention across multiple products and segments. The emphasis on orchestration, identity, consent, and governance reflects the realities of operating lifecycle engagement at scale in a modern subscription environment.
From a career standpoint, the position offers durable SaaS leverage by combining funnel strategy with the mechanics of experimentation and measurement. Building templates, operating models, and deployment workflows creates experience that transfers across SaaS companies that rely on self-serve motions, multi-surface messaging, and rigorous incrementality. The cross-functional interface with Engineering, Product, Data Science, and Analytics also signals a path toward broader growth leadership roles where technical fluency matters as much as creative execution.
This role is best suited to a senior operator who prefers systems thinking over one-off wins and is comfortable making tradeoffs across relevance, frequency, and risk. It will fit someone who enjoys setting standards that other teams can use, and who can move between strategy, tooling requirements, and hands-on journey diagnosis without needing a purely managerial scope.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About the Team
The Growth team drives user and revenue growth across ChatGPT’s consumer and business segments as well as other OpenAI products worldwide. We operate across the full funnel - from awareness and acquisition through activation, retention, and expansion - using a combination of global performance marketing, AI-powered workflows, in-product optimization, insights, experimentation, and creative ops engineering.
About the Role
We are hiring a Lifecycle Lead to build the company-wide owned-channel capability that helps teams reach users with relevant, timely, and trustworthy experiences. This senior, hands-on leader will set the lifecycle strategy, partner with Engineering to build the orchestration and deployment platform, and establish the operating model that allows teams across the company to launch and improve evergreen programs safely at scale.
You will sit at the intersection of platform, product, and campaign strategy. You will partner with Engineering, Product, Data Science, and Analytics on the underlying systems, and with Product Marketing Managers and other client teams to design journeys that help new, active, and returning users reach value and build durable habits.
In this role, you will:
Partner with product to set the company-wide vision, roadmap, and operating model for lifecycle and owned-channel engagement.
Partner with Engineering, Product, Data Science, and Analytics to shape the tooling and infrastructure for identity, audiences, eligibility, consent, triggers, orchestration, decisioning, frequency, experimentation, localization, quality assurance, and observability.
Define scalable deployment workflows—including self-service and centrally supported paths, intake, templates, approvals, governance, service levels, and incident response—so teams across the company can launch safely and efficiently.
Partner with Product Marketing Managers and other client teams to translate audience, product, and business goals into evergreen journey strategies across onboarding, activation, continuation, retention, resurrection, and monetization.
Lead the design, launch, iteration, and optimization of templates and journeys across email, push, and in-product messaging, including the deep-linked landing and post-click product experiences that complete the loop.
Partner with Growth DS to build a measurement system that connects reach, eligibility, delivery, engagement, landing behavior, task completion, retained activity, and incremental value through sound experiments and holdouts.
Optimize the lifecycle portfolio—not just individual sends—by improving inventory, relevance, personalization, prioritization, and per-user frequency.
Inform our owned channel / upsell strategy–establish a high bar for deliverability, user preferences, localization, and operational quality, and trust while influencing senior stakeholders across the company.
You might thrive in this role if you have:
10+ years of experience in lifecycle, CRM, retention, growth, product marketing, or marketing technology, ideally in a global consumer or subscription business.
A track record of building and scaling lifecycle tooling or platforms with Engineering for multiple teams, products, audiences, or markets.
Strong technical and product fluency across event and identity models, data pipelines, APIs, segmentation, triggering, decisioning, experimentation, and deployment systems; coding experience is not required.
Deep campaign and journey craft, with experience designing evergreen programs that move users from message to product value and durable behavior.
Strong experimentation and measurement judgment, including incrementality, holdouts, cohort quality, retention, and lifetime value—not just delivery or click metrics.
Experience creating operating models, governance, templates, and quality standards that increase organizational velocity without creating channel chaos.
Executive-level cross-functional influence and clear communication across Engineering, Product, Data Science, Analytics, PMM, Creative, Legal, Privacy, and regional teams.
A hands-on, systems-oriented leadership style: you can set a multi-year direction, write the brief, inspect the journey, diagnose failures, and make pragmatic tradeoffs in a fast-moving environment.
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.
To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy
At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
