Performance Creative Lead | Paid Social + Sprint Ops Expert

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Performance Creative Lead (Contract) Growth Marketing | Paid Acquisition About the Role: Upwork’s Growth Marketing team powers our biggest bets for new customer acquisition. As we accelerate Paid Acquisition performance, creative has become our most powerful lever. We’re hiring a Performance Creative Lead - a seasoned project manager with paid social experience and a sharp creative eye - to help us build a high-velocity sprint engine that fuels iteration and growth. This is a net-new role: you’ll design the playbook, lead the process, and build systems that scale. You’ll sit within the Paid Acquisition team and be the connective tissue between performance insights, agency partners, and creative execution. You won’t make the creative, but you will own the conditions that make great creative happen. What You’ll Do: Lead the Sprint Engine: Lead and orchestrate our creative sprint cycles (~every 4–6 weeks), including brief creation, timeline management, asset tracking, agency coordination, and post-sprint documentation Build Systems That Scale: Establish repeatable systems, sprint cadences, documentation templates, and feedback workflows that keep creative velocity high without sacrificing quality. Lead Cross-Functional Coordination: Own all communication with creative partners, managing Slack threads, setting up weekly reviews, surfacing performance insights, and consolidating feedback from stakeholders. Write Hypothesis-Driven Briefs: Translate Paid Acq strategy and performance data into crystal-clear creative briefs. You’ll help define which messages, angles, or visual styles we test, and why. Collaborate with Channel Leads: Partner closely with Paid Social and other channel owners to understand performance trends, prioritize testing needs, and ensure creative inputs are timely, relevant, and grounded in real data. Fuel Test-and-Learn Velocity: Drive experimentation across Meta, LinkedIn, Reddit, and beyond. Capture sprint-level learnings and ensure they feed forward into future creative planning. Champion Speed Over Perfection: Embrace the mindset of “test, learn, scale.” You’ll help build a culture that acts fast, iterates smarter, and compounds insights every sprint. Explore AI as a Force Multiplier: Identify opportunities where AI tools can accelerate iteration, streamline feedback loops, and unlock scale, particularly by pushing our agency partners to adopt smarter, faster workflows. Who Are You: Expert Project Manager: You bring structure to ambiguity. You’ve led marketing programs, managed timelines, and kept partners accountable. Paid Acquisition Native: You understand how Meta works. You’ve supported or run campaigns and know how to bridge creative and channel strategy. Creative Strategist at Heart: You know what makes great ads convert, even if you’re not the one designing them. You can write a killer brief that gets to the “why.” Cross-Functional Connector: You build relationships across teams and keep everyone aligned, from channel managers to agencies to marketing leaders. AI-Curious Operator: You’re familiar with emerging tools and excited by how they can scale iteration and improve workflow. Outcome-Driven: You focus on what moves the needle. You’re energized by performance data and accountable to results. Zero-to-One Builder: You’ve helped stand up new processes or models before, and you’re excited to do it again. Preferred Background: 5–8 years of experience in performance marketing, creative operations, or growth strategy Required: Experience managing Paid Social campaigns (especially Meta) Required: Experience leading creative testing initiatives and managing external agencies Required: Hands-on experience with creative testing, including multivariate or inferential testing approaches Proven success developing creative briefs that drive performance outcomes Familiarity with inferential creative testing frameworks (e.g., multivariate ABO testing)

Keyword: Ad Design

Ad Creative Facebook Advertising Creative Brief Performance Marketing Project Management