Big Wave Digital - USA is hiring: Marketing & Strategy Lead (Ads): Ex-Consultant

Blue pill: you stay at the firm, or at the brand, and keep doing the thing you already know how to do. Nice deck. Nice dashboard. Nothing changes.
Red pill: you join a four-person AI startup in the Financial District as the first person on the customer side of the business, watch a set of AI agents run paid media for consumer brands in ways no media buyer could, and spend the next few years building the function that sits between those agents and the humans who pay for them.
This ad is for people who already know which pill they would take. It is also, deliberately, for a very narrow group: people who learned to think at McKinsey, Bain or BCG, then left to run real money inside Meta and Google ad accounts at a consumer startup. The founders have met plenty of people with one half of that story. They are only hiring the whole thing.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. — Will Durant, summarising Aristotle
The real world

The company was funded in 2025, has paying consumer-brand customers, and is building autonomous AI that plans, runs and optimises paid advertising, doing what agencies and in-house media buyers do today with less guesswork and more speed. The two founders held senior roles at one of the largest ad platforms on earth, where they helped take a product from zero to several hundred million dollars in annual revenue. The engineers around them came from the top of the industry.
Right now the founders personally run every customer relationship. That is the glitch in the system. You fix it by owning the customer book outright, becoming the human face of the product for a growing set of brands, and over time building deployment and customer success from nothing: playbooks, processes, cadence and eventually a team.
I know that I know nothing. — Socrates, as reported by Plato
What you actually do

You start as an individual contributor with full ownership of the customer book. The path to leading a team is real and the founders want the person in this seat to grow into it.
There are no facts, only interpretations. — Friedrich Nietzsche
Who the founders are looking for (the MBB and performance-marketing bit)

The arc is the whole point, in this order:
Management consulting first, ideally McKinsey, Bain or BCG. Structured thinking, senior-client presence, the discipline of building a tight argument from messy data. Tier-two strategy firms are considered.
Then hands-on performance marketing at a fast-growing consumer startup or an adtech startup serving those brands. You personally ran campaigns inside Meta and Google ad accounts (TikTok, Pinterest or similar a plus) for a direct-to-consumer brand that scaled quickly. Your name was on the account and the results. Overseeing an agency does not count.
Three to fifteen years in total. Fifteen is the ceiling because this is a founding IC role, not a VP-of-marketing-in-waiting.
Ad-performance analysis you can do yourself: open an account, read the data, run an audit, judge whether a campaign is working, explain it in a few slides to someone who does not live in the ads manager. Spreadsheet fluency assumed; SQL or Python a bonus.
You tinker and build with AI. A must-have, and the most common reason otherwise-strong candidates have been declined. You use LLMs and developer tools to automate your own work, you have built small things with agentic coding tools such as Claude Code or Codex, and you can show them.
Energy, storytelling, presence. Founders, CMOs and heads of growth all day, at startup pace.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. — attributed to Leonardo da Vinci
The practical bits

How the interview runs

A screen with Big Wave Digital to confirm the arc, the depth and the logistics.
A founder conversation about your consulting and paid-media experience and how you think about ads.
An ad-analysis exercise that mirrors the real work: account data in, audit and recommendations out.
A paid in-office work trial in New York, a day or so on real customer problems with the team.
Offer.
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. — commonly attributed to Charles Darwin
The full brief in long form is here: https://bigwavedigital.com/jobs/founding-deployment-strategist-ads-new-york-city/

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