Director, Lifecycle Marketing

Who We Are

Arcady Media is a lifecycle marketing agency. We do one thing: retention and lifecycle for DTC and CPG brands.

• Founded January 2023. Independent and bootstrapped, with no outside investors.
• ~35 people across North America and the UK, headquartered in Toronto.
• One of two Elite Klaviyo partners in Canada.
• We build our own software on top of Klaviyo and Shopify, including the first agentic tool on the Klaviyo App Store.

We've grown quickly enough that roles like this one now need to exist, and we're at the stage where the person filling them shapes what they become.

Our three core values: Embrace Collaboration, Continuous Learning, Be Honest.

Why This Role Exists Now

We'll be direct, because the right person for this job will read the following as opportunity rather than as a warning.

Our Lifecycle Marketing Managers own the retention roadmap on their accounts, and they're good at it. What sits above them: service design, pricing, the commercial shape of the department, and enterprise level strategy, is currently split between two leads.

Our Director of Operations carries the operational half. Our CEO carries the strategic half. Both are doing it on top of running the company, which means product, marketing, systemization, and vision aren't getting the time they need. We can't reach the next stage that way.

Three things need an owner:

Client LTV, owning the retention roadmap. Our managers run subscription and loyalty programs. Nobody designs and prices them as offerings we sell, or decides the plan for the biggest accounts over the next year. That's the difference between running a retention roadmap and growing an account.

Speed to value, and proof of it. A client should see ROI inside the first 90 days. That means onboarding moves fast, the audit that opens the engagement gets followed rather than drifting, and reporting is sound enough that the client can see what they're getting.

Visibility in the ecosystem. We have a Strategic Partnerships lead expanding our position inside Klaviyo and a Paid Acquisition lead filling our marketing funnel. What's missing is a senior operator in the rooms - at events, in front of merchants, feeding back what clients actually respond to. We also build our own software, including the first agentic tool on the Klaviyo App Store - we're looking for someone to help us to build case studies and the moat.

We're not going to pretend the house is in order. It isn't, in specific and knowable ways. What we have is real distribution, real product, and a team that wants to be taught by the best.

How This Role Fits on the Team

You report to our Director of Operations. The CEO stays heavily involved.

Four direct reports today, and the department is growing. Three Lifecycle Marketing Managers and one Associate Lifecycle Marketing Manager. Your span of control expands as the department does - which is also what sizes the bonus attached to this seat.

Pod structure: each Lifecycle Marketing Manager runs two pods. A pod holds a content strategist and two email designers, and one email technician is shared across the manager's two pods. The Associate runs a single pod. That's roughly seven people under each full manager, carrying 10–15 active clients depending on complexity.

Peer leaders you'll work with constantly: our Strategic Partnerships lead, who came from Shopify and is expanding our position inside Klaviyo; our Marketing lead, running top-of-funnel and paid; and our Director of Sales and his Customer Success Manager, who you'll work with on handoffs, onboarding speed, and retention.

What You'll Own

1. Higher-tier accounts and packaging

• Act as second strategist alongside the lifecycle manager on our upper-package accounts
• Decide what gets added to, repriced, or retired from our packages
• Own gross margin and effective hourly rate by account and by pod
• Run capacity planning across pods
• Model months-to-break-even on free and low-cost onboardings

2. Client Retention & Expansion

• Grow accounts: renewals, package upgrades, contract value expansion
• Tie results back to what the client hired us to fix, including when the problem sits upstream of lifecycle (e.g paid media etc.)
• Build the email and SMS strategy that supports clients' subscription and loyalty programs
• Teach managers to read an account's numbers and spot the next move: CRO, a new SKU, a bigger package

3. Delivery integrity and QA

• Check that delivery still matches the opening audit throughout each engagement
• Write and maintain SOPs for segmentation, flow architecture, and testing
• Own the QA process and make sure the team follows it
• Coach misses, and handle the hard conversation when coaching doesn't work

4. The Team

• Coach and develop your Lifecycle Marketing Managers
• Hire as the department grows, starting with a new pod
• Build the content strategist to lifecycle manager pathway
• Develop your own successor

Qualifications & Experience

• 7+ years in lifecycle, CRM, or retention marketing, with at least 3 leading people, including managers rather than only individual contributors.
• Deep CRM & Lifecycle experience. You could step into any account on our book and hold your own on flow architecture, segmentation, testing, and deliverability.
• Client-facing leadership in a services or agency setting. You've presented results to founders and marketing leads, handled escalations, and kept accounts through hard quarters.
• Commercial ownership of a book of work: margin, effective hourly rate, capacity, and scoping. You know what an account costs to run and what it should cost.
• You've built client reporting that ties lifecycle work to business outcomes (LTV, repeat rate, margin), not just attributed revenue.
• You've built or rebuilt a QA or delivery-standards process for a team, and can explain how it was enforced: who checks what, when, and what happens when it fails.
• You've written SOPs and frameworks that people still followed after you stopped watching.
• You've had hard performance conversations, including exits.
• You use LLMs and automation in your own work every day, not just in theory.

Preferred

• You've working on Klaviyo & Shopify or Salesforce.
• You've evolved or priced a service offering: packaging, positioning, and the margin structure underneath it.
• You've grown accounts, not just retained them: upsells, package moves, contract value expansion.
• Working knowledge of subscription and loyalty tooling (Recharge, Skio, Loop, or similar) and how email and SMS sit around it.
• Real relationships inside the Klaviyo ecosystem: partner managers, CSMs, leadership.
• Platform migration experience, including the data integrity and compliance side (CASL, GDPR, CAN-SPAM).

How You Work:

• Accountability and communication are explicit leadership non-negotiables for you, articulable rather than implied.
• You're a grounded realist who can be a counterweight to a fast-moving founder without killing momentum. We move quickly and sometimes we should move slower. Naming that is part of the job.
• High standards on client-facing polish. You'll coach how people show up on calls, down to filler words.
• Challenger mindset with clients: you bring them something they hadn't considered rather than validating what they already know.
• High-context learner. You ask a lot of questions early and want to understand people and process before changing them.
• You're motivated by getting the best results for clients and growing your team members.

Tools and AI

• Our stack: Slack, ClickUp, Zoom, Google Meet, Figma, Google Workspace, Klaviyo, and Shopify.
• We're AI-first in how we're built, not just in how we talk. We have an in-house AI engineer.
• We shipped one of the first agentic tools on the Klaviyo App Store.
• We expect you to use LLMs and automation every day to work faster and think better.

Compensation and Benefits

• Base salary: $140,000 CAD
• Location: This is an in-office role in Toronto, so you need to be commutable to us.
• Quarterly bonus on top of base. Strong performance lands total compensation around $180,000 CAD, with a ceiling of $210,000. The bonus is driven by department gross margin, the average pod performance score across your managers, and a client-retention eligibility gate. Full mechanics are shared as a schedule to the offer, and we'll walk you through the math before you sign anything.
• 5 weeks vacation.
• Health benefits are not yet in place. We're bootstrapped and we reinvest aggressively. Benefits unlock for the entire team at a specific departmental revenue goal.
• Travel to partner and industry events across Canada and the US: Klaviyo programming in Boston, K:BOS, Shopify sessions, and partner meetings. Our position in this ecosystem was built in rooms like these, and you'd be in them.
• Mentorship and direct exposure to Klaviyo and Shopify leadership.
• A portfolio built on high-profile DTC brands, and a real seat in a category we intend to own.

How to Apply

Stage 1: Complete the pre-screening form linked.

If you are successful, you will move onto the next phase of our interview process.

Stage 2: Meet-and-greet call with one of our team members → Vibe Check!

Stage 3: Trial Assessment → Could be a call or a task

Stage 4: Shortlist all candidates

Stage 5: Interview with CEO → Alignment

Stage 6: Present you with an offer to join our team.