GTM Engineer (Go-to-market) | Regulated DTC Consumer Brand

Company Overview:

Our client is a small, founder-led consumer brand based in Austin, TX, that makes a regulated nicotine product (tobacco-free pouches) and sells it direct-to-consumer in the UK. Because Meta, Google, and TikTok all prohibit nicotine advertising, there is no ad budget this company can spend to buy growth — every channel that's left (search, owned email and SMS, subscription retention, referral, retail and trade, athlete and podcast partnerships, field sampling) has to be built and wired together by hand. That constraint is the whole shape of this job.

Your Role:

This role exists because the easy version of growth marketing isn't available here — someone has to build the campaign machinery, not just brief it. You'll spend real time each week directing Claude Code to connect APIs, enrich lists, and automate recurring work, and the rest of your time running campaigns alongside the people actually knocking on doors: sales, field, and partnerships. You report directly to the two founders, at manager level, fully hands-on, with no reports of your own (headcount comes later, if at all). Success looks like a trade and partnership outbound engine that runs itself, a field team that's armed and getting better each cycle, owned channels (search, lifecycle, retention, referral) doing the growth work that paid acquisition can't, and numbers everyone can actually trust.

A note on the category: this is a regulated product, and the rules aren't style guidance — they're hard constraints on the job itself. No health, cessation, or performance claims anywhere, ever. Age and territory gating (18+, UK only) stays intact, full stop. No paid social or paid search for the product, no workarounds. Nothing overstated in writing. If that reads as a limitation on the work rather than the actual shape of it, this isn't the right seat.

You'll:

• Build and run the trade and partnership outbound engine — define the segment, pull and enrich the list, verify and score contacts, write and track the sequence, and know when not to use a sequencer (some outreach has to go out by hand)

• Arm the field team (sampling, shop visits, trade shows) with target lists, routes, one-pagers, and post-visit follow-up sequences, then work alongside them so the next version is better

• Own the channels that are actually open here: search and content, lifecycle email and SMS, subscription retention (win-back, dunning recovery, pause-instead-of-cancel), and referral programs, including the reconciliation behind them

• Produce creative in-house with AI tools against the brand's existing visual system — knowing when to generate, when to composite a real product shot instead, and when to send a piece to a human

• Automate anything manual and recurring — enrichment scripts, list hygiene, report pulls, campaign QA, content pipelines — instead of adding it to someone's checklist

• Own first-party measurement (order and subscription data, cohort retention, referral attribution, search visibility), since no ad platform is feeding this business conversion data, and flag a bad number before anyone else finds it

You Bring:

• Real, hands-on experience directing Claude Code (or an equivalent coding agent) on live work — connected to an API or MCP server, shipping something still in use today. This is the one non-negotiable requirement on this list, and it's tested directly in the interview process; nearly everything else here is trainable

• 3+ years hands-on in marketing — the profile that fits typically started in a coordinator-type role, got tired of waiting on others to pull data or wire up tools, and taught themselves to do it

• Cold outbound you've run yourself, start to finish: built the list, wrote the sequence, watched the reply rate, fixed deliverability when it broke, using Apollo or an equivalent plus at least one sequencer

• Comfortable with data — you read a CSV without flinching, write SQL or get there with help, and know why a bad join can quietly double your numbers

• Working scripting ability in Python or JavaScript (or a track record of directing AI to write and debug it while keeping it honest), and you use git

• APIs are ordinary to you: auth, keys, rate limits, webhooks, and reading docs to find the endpoint you need

• A genuine eye for marketing — you can tell a good offer from a weak one, spot a broken page, and write an email a retail buyer will actually answer — and you write plainly, in specific, filler-free sentences

Bonus Points:

• Experience with this kind of stack: list/enrichment tools (e.g. Apollo), sequencers, a commerce/subscription backend, Postgres/SQL, transactional email, SEO tooling, workflow automation (e.g. n8n), and AI image tools

• Background marketing in a regulated or high-constraint category (alcohol, supplements, pharma, gambling, or similar), where claims review and compliance shape every campaign

• DTC subscription or ecommerce experience, especially retention/win-back programs and referral mechanics

What’s Offered:

• Based in Austin, TX, or remote with 9–5 CT overlap

• Direct reporting line to the two founders — high visibility, real ownership, minimal layers

• A hands-on, builder-first seat: you ship the work yourself rather than briefing someone else to

• Real autonomy over a growth stack built on search, lifecycle, retention, referral, trade, and field — not ad spend

• The chance to help build out the company's own agent and automation stack from the ground up

• Compensation based on experience and location — to confirm with the client before this goes to candidates

Interview Process:

• Screening call (30 minutes) — walking through that build in detail

• Paid exercise (about 3 hours) — given a target segment and API access, produce a scored, enriched contact list, a three-touch sequence, and the script or flow that generated it; one touch has to survive a claims review

• Working session with a founder — pick the exercise apart together and build one more thing live in Claude Code