Lifecycle Marketing Manager
About the role
Sleeper is where millions of sports fans play fantasy, make picks, and follow the games together. We've built a product people love — and now we're building the lifecycle program to match it.
This is a rare zero-to-one role, embedded directly with our product team. Every automated journey — onboarding, activation, retention, win-back — is yours to design and build. You'll own the strategy and the execution, from segmentation logic to the copy that ships.
You'll sit with product because lifecycle is product here: the moments that matter happen in the app, and your work shapes how users discover, adopt, and stick with what we build.
What you'll do
Build out and optimize our lifecycle program in Braze — canvases for onboarding, activation, retention, and reactivation across push, email, and in-app.
Strengthen email as a channel. Own email deliverability end to end: domain warm-up, list hygiene, and engagement-based sending.
Own segmentation and targeting. Define audiences from behavioral data, and partner with data and engineering to get the events and attributes you need instrumented.
Run real experiments. Holdouts, incrementality, and A/B tests — measure lift, not vanity metrics.
Drive lifecycle for tentpole moments — season kickoffs, competitions, and product launches — partnering closely with PMs, design, and marketing.
Set the operating standards: naming conventions, QA, frequency capping, and how we decide what's worth sending.
What we're looking for
3-5 years in lifecycle, CRM, or growth marketing, with meaningful ownership of a consumer program.
Deep hands-on Braze experience (or comparable: Iterable, Airship, Customer.io) — you've built multi-step, branching journeys yourself, not just briefed them.
Strong grasp of email deliverability — sender reputation, authentication, and engagement-based sending. Bonus if you've personally run a domain warm-up or deliverability recovery.
Analytically rigorous. Comfortable in the data, designing holdouts, and telling incremental lift from correlation.
A builder's bias. You're energized by a blank slate and can go from strategy to shipped without waiting for a team.
Clear writer. You can write a push notification that gets tapped and an email that gets opened.
Collaborative with product and engineering — you can scope an instrumentation ask and see it through.
Bonus points
Experience with in-app messaging and push, not just email
Experience in — or genuine passion/ curiosity for — sports, fantasy, DFS, gaming, or another real-money/regulated consumer product
Familiarity with responsible-gaming or compliance-aware messaging
SQL, and comfort working directly with a data warehouse
You're a sports fan who actually uses products like ours
Why this role
You won't be optimizing someone else's program — you'll be defining ours. High autonomy, a direct line to the product team, and measurable impact on activation, retention, and revenue.