Associate Director, Retention

About Darkroom

Darkroom is the leading next-generation growth marketing firm engineering the brands of tomorrow. Founded in 2017, we set out to redefine what a modern agency could be, by replacing the inertia of legacy advertising behemoths with a model built for speed, intelligence, and measurable impact.

At our core, Darkroom is a human services company powered by Shadow
, a universal AI commerce layer that integrates executive-level strategy with proprietary agentic technology. This fusion enables our teams to deliver outsized returns by enhancing creative output, operational efficiency, and revenue generation across every stage of the customer journey.

Our track record speaks for itself:
billions in attributable revenue driven across e-commerce marketplaces, media networks, DTC ecosystems, and social commerce platforms. Every engagement feeds into our proprietary data infrastructure, enabling a continuous feedback loop that accelerates growth, improves margins, and compounds results across our client portfolio.

What began as a boutique design studio has evolved into one of the fastest-growing private companies in America (Inc. 5000) and among the most effective performance media agencies of the 2020s (Varos). Our founders were recognized by Forbes 30 Under 30 for advancing the intersection of technology, marketing, and advertising, cementing Darkroom’s role as a defining player in the future of media innovation.

We are looking for a highly analytical, commercially-minded Director who is motivated by the challenge of building a retention program for a high-growth consumer technology company. You will lead a team of lifecycle marketing experts to drive subscriber growth and revenue, and partner with cross-functional colleagues to go deeper on customer behavior — with a specific focus on activation, loyalty, and long-term customer value.

You are building this program from the ground up rather than optimizing one that already exists. The list starts near 20,000 and scales rapidly behind a significant acquisition investment. Sending volume ramps to 40–60 emails a month, and increasingly granular segmentation is what drives that output. Automation is the engine: lead capture, welcome series, and the first-conversion funnel come first, then subscription activation, loyalty, and repeat purchase.

The program runs on enterprise tooling - Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Iterable, Customer.io, or comparable.

You own the top-line retention revenue number for your client. You build the forecast, defend it, and lead the team that hits it.

We are open to candidates in NYC, NJ, Florida and Texas.

You are a growth marketer first and a lifecycle marketer second. You think in cohorts, conversion rates, and payback periods. You are energized by a program that does not exist yet and a list that is about to grow 10x.

• 7+ years of experience in digital, growth, or lifecycle marketing, including time spent on subscription or SaaS products.
• You have owned a revenue or subscriber target and built the forecast behind it — you can model list growth, conversion, activation, and churn and explain what moves each one.
• You have scaled a lifecycle program through a period of rapid list growth, and you know what breaks when volume goes from a handful of sends to 40–60 per month.
• You have built the funnel that matters here: lead capture, welcome series, first conversion, and subscription activation. You know the difference between a welcome flow that greets people and one that converts them.
• You are fluent in subscription economics — trial-to-paid, activation, free-to-paid, upgrade and downgrade paths, involuntary churn, and win-back.
• You have developed loyalty, referral,…