Senior User Acquisition Manager

About us We're building Animates https://animates.ai/ — an AI companion app. Not a chatbot. Not a waifu app. A companion who remembers what you told them three weeks ago, notices you're off before you say so, and is still there on your laptop when you close your phone. They have a face. They look at you when you speak. They react in real time. All of it rests on one thing: our own animation model, running locally on-device. We have a live product and a community that found us on their own. What we don't have yet is paid acquisition. That's the job. About the role Joining us at this stage is a unique opportunity to work directly with the founders, shape the company's growth, and make a real impact. As we scale, your growth scales with us. We value expertise, embrace initiative, and empower you to make decisions and showcase your skills. Our decision-making process is fast and efficient, giving you the freedom to contribute meaningfully and drive results. You're the first marketing hire in the company. There is no channel mix to inherit, no historical dashboard to read, no playbook to follow. You build the acquisition function — and then you help us build the team around it. What you'd own - Paid UA from zero. Channel selection, media plan, test structure, budget logic. You decide what we try first and why. - Finding what works. Geo × channel × creative × audience. - The numbers. MMP setup, attribution, cohorts, CAC / ROAS / LTV. Including the part where you tell us the math doesn't converge. - Creative direction. You'd brief it yourself at first, and later help us hire a dedicated creative producer and set up the production pipeline together. - Store and platform moderation. AI companions sit in a sensitive category almost everywhere. Navigating that is part of the job here. How we work You'd work directly with the founders — that's where direction is set, and decisions are made, usually in the same conversation. No layers, no approval queues. You bring a hypothesis, we fund it, or we park it, and you move on. Budgets follow the math. Tests start small; once the unit economics hold, scale isn't the constraint. We're a pre-PMF company, and we're honest about what that means: some hypotheses won't survive contact with reality, priorities can shift, and not everything will be figured out when you arrive. If that sounds like a reason to say no, we understand. If it sounds like the interesting part, we'd like to talk. What we're looking for We know this list describes more than one person's ideal career path. We'd rather tell you what the job actually needs and let you decide where you land — if you're strong on most of it and curious about the rest, apply. - 4+ years in paid UA on mobile consumer products. Gaming or entertainment is a strong plus. - Buying experience in Japan, or across Asia more broadly (Japan / Korea). This is the one that matters most to us. - Experience running meaningful budgets. We're not looking for a specific number, but we do want someone who has been through a scale, not only through tests. - Mobile ad networks (AppLovin, Unity, Moloco, Mintegral, Liftoff) — hands-on. This is where most of the volume in our category lives, especially in Asia. - Meta and TikTok — creative-driven buying, where you've owned the pipeline and not only the account. - Google App Campaigns as a working baseline. - Apple Search Ads and Japanese platforms (LINE Ads, Yahoo! Japan) — a strong signal, though we don't expect all of it. - You read cohorts before you read spend, and you're comfortable killing your own campaigns. - A feel for global consumer culture and where trends move. We build for the US, Japan, and Korea, and a media buyer who only reads Western taste will miss half the room. - Working English. Plus Russian, Ukrainian, or Belarusian — that's how the team talks internally today. If you have deep Asian market experience but a narrower channel mix — or a strong channel mix and one market you opened from scratch — we'd s