Growth Marketing Manager, Paid Media & Audience Growth

Washington, D.C.
Full-time
Posted Sep 24, 2026

Skills

Google Analytics
Paid Ads
TikTok
Recruiting
Writing

Job description

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube.

Shield is seeking a marketing manager to expand our paid media function with a dedicated focus on audience-first growth. This role builds on our current paid media efforts with a sharper focus on paid channels, audience targeting, and measurable growth.

This is not a standard demand generation role. Shield's audiences are highly specific, distributed across specialized communities, and often difficult to reach through generic B2B or consumer marketing playbooks. We are looking for someone who is genuinely curious about who these people are, where they spend time, what they care about, what signals indicate intent or influence, and how paid media can help us reach them with precision and credibility.

You will work on paid media strategy and execution across priority audiences, with an emphasis on paid social and video channels such as LinkedIn, Meta, X, Reddit, and YouTube. You will also help us explore DSPs, display, programmatic, out-of-home, and other paid channels that can support more granular talent, stakeholder, and influencer targeting. The right person has real hands-on paid media experience, strong audience instincts, and the ability to apply best practices from other industries to a new and challenging defense technology context.

What you'll do:

•Build Shield’s paid media strategy across priority audiences, including defense, national security, aerospace, policy, technical, and influencer communities.

•Translate audience research into targeting strategies across paid social, video, display, programmatic/DSP, search, retargeting, and emerging channels.

•Develop segmentation and testing frameworks based on personas, communities, content interests, geography, behavioral signals, platform behavior, creative, landing pages, and measurement methods.

•Partner with Social, Communications, Creative, Video, Field Marketing, Talent, and Product Marketing to turn performance insights into audience playbooks, paid media briefs, and future investment recommendations.

•Launch, manage, and optimize paid campaigns across platforms such as LinkedIn, Meta, YouTube, Reddit, X, Google, and other relevant channels, including budgets, pacing, targeting, creative rotation, and in-flight performance improvements.

Required qualifications:

•5-8+ years of hands-on experience building, launching, managing, and optimizing paid media campaigns in paid media, growth marketing, performance marketing, digital acquisition, audience development, or a related field, including meaningful campaign budget ownership.

•Strong paid social and video experience across platforms such as LinkedIn, Meta, YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, X, or similar channels.

•Demonstrated ability to turn audience strategy into active campaign execution using platform-native targeting, first-party data, behavioral signals, contextual signals, lookalikes, retargeting, geography, interests, and persona-based segmentation.

•Strong analytical and strategic judgment, including experience using campaign reporting, GA4 or similar analytics tools, UTMs, pixels, conversion events, and structured testing to make in-flight optimizations and communicate performance insights to creative, technical, analytical, and executive stakeholders.

Preferred qualifications:

•Experience with defense, aerospace, national security, government, or other complex stakeholder audiences.

•Experience using DSPs or programmatic platforms such as The Trade Desk, DV360, StackAdapt, or similar tools.

•Experience with out-of-home, CTV/OTT, podcasts, newsletters, or other channels beyond standard paid social and search.

•Familiarity with incrementality testing, lift studies, MMM, or other advanced measurement approaches.

•Strong writing, creative briefing, or messaging instincts. High attention to detail.

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Full-time regular employee offer package:

Pay within range listed + Bonus + Benefits + Equity

Temporary employee offer package:

Pay within range listed above + temporary benefits package (applicable after 60 days of employment)

Salary compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, licenses and certifications, and specific work location. All offers are contingent on a cleared background and possible reference check. Military fellows and part-time employees are not eligible for benefits. Please speak to your talent acquisition representative for more information.

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Shield AI is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.