Senior Paid Social Lead

About Gusto

At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff — payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR — so owners can focus on their craft and their customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we support more than 500,000 small businesses nationwide and are building a workplace that reflects the people we serve.

 
All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs) — because everyone who helps build Gusto should share in its success. Offer amounts are determined by role, level, and location. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.

 
AI is a fundamental part of how work gets done at Gusto. We expect all team members to actively engage with AI tools relevant to their role and grow their fluency as the technology evolves. AI experience requirements vary by role and will be assessed during the interview process.

About the Role

Gusto is looking for a Paid Social Marketing Lead to own our paid social program end-to-end, from brand awareness through conversion, across social channels such as Meta, LinkedIn, Reddit, and TikTok. This is a high-visibility, high-impact role at the intersection of performance marketing, creative strategy, and AI-powered workflow design. You will serve as the strategic lead for paid acquisition across paid social and adjacent channels, setting the framework for how paid media operates within Gusto's demand generation engine. You'll have full strategic and creative latitude over one of Gusto's most important acquisition channels, with direct influence on pipeline and revenue. If you're a full-funnel paid social operator who thinks in systems, holds creative and data rigor in equal measure, and uses AI as a genuine daily tool, we want to meet you.

About the Team

As a member of Gusto’s Demand Generation team, you will be embedded specifically within Paid Acquisition, a focused group responsible for driving awareness and pipeline through paid media. This team operates with high autonomy, a bias for experimentation, and a culture of cross-functional partnership. We hold ourselves to a high standard, move fast, and genuinely believe that being AI-native is part of what it means to do this job well today.

Here's what you'll do day-to-day:

• Own paid social strategy and execution across Meta, LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, and TikTok, driving full-funnel campaigns from brand awareness through retargeting and conversion, with accountability to pipeline and revenue targets.
• Manage significant, multi-million dollar budgets with rigor, including campaign pacing, forecasting, budget-vs-actuals analysis, and making the case for paid social investment in imperfect attribution environments.
• Define and socialize Gusto's paid acquisition measurement framework, including attribution philosophy and budget allocation principles, establishing this as the standard for the broader marketing team.
• Lead creative strategy and testing at scale: briefing creative studios and agencies, structuring meaningful experiments, interpreting complex data sets to drive actionable insights, and building a clear learning roadmap.
• Act as Gusto's internal subject matter expert on paid social and AI-powered marketing workflows, developing playbooks and frameworks adopted across the marketing org.
• Partner with Web Marketing to align on landing page strategy, message match, and post-click conversion, because paid social performance doesn't end at the click.
• Manage agencies and contractors, and an IC by setting clear expectations, reviewing quality, and holding partners accountable to results.
• Use AI tools as a consistent, habitual part of your workflow: generating campaign briefs, developing copy variants, accelerating audience research, and building reusable systems that raise the bar for the whole team.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Integrated Marketing, Communications, and Web to align paid social with integrated campaigns, product launches, and earned media moments, and bring performance data back upstream to influence creative production and asset strategy.

Here's what we're looking for:

• 12+ years of paid social experience or equivalent at a B2B SaaS, performance marketing agency, or high-growth consumer organization.
• Full-funnel ownership across two or more major paid social platforms (Meta, LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, TikTok) with significant budget responsibility and a track record of driving measurable pipeline impact.
• Demonstrated experience managing external agencies and/or contractors, setting expectations, measuring performance, and holding partners to a high bar.
• Strong creative strategy and testing instincts: you know how to structure a test, distinguish a learning from a result, and translate performance data into creative direction.
• AI-fluent in practice, not just in theory; you use AI tools consistently in your day-to-day workflow to accelerate briefs, copy, and analysis, and have a track record of implementing AI-driven efficiencies for your team.
• Excellent cross-functional collaborator who can translate integrated briefs into paid social strategy, advocate for what the channel needs, and work effectively alongside brand, web, and comms partners.
• You are analytical and data-driven, with a clear point of view on attribution in imperfect measurement environments and comfort communicating paid social's contribution to business outcomes.

Compensation

Our cash compensation amount for this role is $151,020/yr to $180,000/yr in Denver, Phoenix/Scottsdale, Las Vegas, Chicago, and Atlanta, and $177,550/yr to $210,000/yr for San Francisco & New York. The cash compensation range for Toronto is (CAD) $134,285 - $158,000. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate location, experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.