Sr. Principal, Growth & AI Systems

About the Role

Engine's Performance Marketing team has a unique opportunity to significantly scale the impact of our paid programs. Our mission is to power connection through simplified travel and this role is a key hire in building a firm technical foundation for how we scale. We’re looking for an AI & Marketing Technology expert who can understand complex systems, connect the dots with data and drive business outcomes.

The Sr. Principal, Growth & AI Systems is the connective tissue between Engine's data infrastructure and our media channels – and the person responsible for making the entire Performance Marketing team AI-native over time. This role reports to the Director of Performance.

Our ideal candidate is a systems thinker who can see how a broken Salesforce field creates a cascade of bad media optimization decisions three steps downstream. You've personally implemented CAPI, offline conversion imports, or similar signal infrastructure, not just directed an agency to do it. You're comfortable with APIs, no-code automation, and SQL at a functional level, and you've used AI tools in a marketing context enough to evaluate them on outcomes rather than novelty. You translate fluidly between marketing and technical language, and you build things the team actually uses.

What you'll do

• Build a MarTech infrastructure to support a Growth team with ambitious targets allowing us to seamlessly enrich our 1P data and connect with our ideal clients.
• Implement and own our attribution infrastructure in partnership with our Analytics and Product teams to ensure proper measurement is feeding how we report impact
• Drive measurable improvements in Google Optimization Score and Meta EMQ score by feeding platforms the full conversion funnel, not just platform-reported events
• Partner with the analytics team to define which events and audiences flow into our media platforms and in what format
• Audit existing AI experiments across the Performance Marketing team; consolidate, kill what isn't working, and build a maintained skill library to supercharge our team
• Build and document repeatable AI workflows for audience segmentation, creative brief generation, channel optimization, performance reporting, and channel expansion 
• Evaluate, onboard, and own AI tools relevant to performance marketing including vendor relationships and team training
• Maintain the team's AI system over time as models, tools, and channels evolve — this is not a "set it and forget it" role
• Build the measurement and signal architecture for each new channels before launch – defining the "channel readiness checklist" that net-new channels must meet before spend begins
• Own the unified performance dashboard that surfaces channel health, spend efficiency, and optimization signals to the team and leadership
• Build automated alerts and anomaly detection so Performance Managers spend less time on reporting and more time on strategy
• Partner across the Growth and Ops team on tooling overlap – you own AI and signal systems 

Who you are

• 7-10 years in marketing technology, performance marketing, or growth engineering
• You've personally implemented or managed complex marketing systems, CAPI, or similar signal infrastructure
• Comfortable working in APIs, no-code automation tools, and SQL at a functional level 
• You've used AI tools in a marketing context and understand how LLMs, automation, and data pipelines fit together
• Experience working alongside or within a data/analytics team, you understand how to consume data infrastructure 
• Systems thinker who can see how a broken upstream field creates a cascade of bad downstream optimization decisions
• Curious about AI and what can be built, you’re constantly evaluating tools on outcomes
• You can translate between marketing language and technical language with equal fluency – comfortable in a room with the analytics team in the morning and a Performance Manager in the afternoon
• Bias toward shipping things the team uses, not elegant systems nobody touches
• You are NOT a marketing generalist who "also knows some AI tools" – technical depth on signal and attribution is non-negotiable
• This is an IC role, not a management role – you build, you don't direct