Performance Marketing Manager - Direct Acquisition / Performance Marketing

About the Company

Small businesses move fast. Opportunities often don’t wait, and cash flow pressures can appear overnight. To keep going, and growing, SMEs need finance that’s as flexible and responsive as they are. That’s why we built iwoca. Our smart technology, data science and five‑star customer service ensures business owners can act with the speed, confidence and control they need, exactly when it’s needed. We’ve already cleared the way for 100,000 businesses with more than £4 billion in funding. Our passionate team is driven to help even more SMEs succeed, through access to better finance and other services that make running a business easier. Our ultimate mission is to support one million SMEs in their defining moments, creating lasting impact for the communities and economies they drive.

The Role

This is a high‑impact, multi‑channel role where you’ll work across Paid Search, Direct Mail and emerging digital platforms/trends to drive acquisition growth at iwoca. You won’t be managing a single channel in isolation. You’ll be helping automate operations, challenge model outputs, launch new products and push into new ad formats across three interconnected areas. The thread connecting everything: using AI and automation to do more, faster, with better judgment.

Responsibilities

• Paid Search Account Management & Hygiene: Launch, optimise and scale campaigns across Google Search, Performance Max, YouTube and Demand Gen. Keep the Google and Microsoft Search accounts healthy, consolidated, and growing – increasingly by building agents to handle the repetitive hygiene work (negatives, quality‑score triage, consolidation) and spending your own time on the non‑obvious calls.
• Performance Insight: Build agent‑driven monitoring and reporting to spot issues and opportunities faster than a human eyeballing dashboards ever could (keywords, landing pages, search terms, creative assets). Turn the resulting data into decisions: which campaigns to scale, kill, restructure. Reporting is an output of this, not the job. Report on channel performance to stakeholders on a regular basis using both in‑platform and internal funnel data.
• Testing & New Opportunities: Analyse performance data to deliver actionable insights and support ideas for testing and optimisation based on clear hypotheses (landing‑page engagement metrics, keyword themes with lower conversion rate, under‑performing creative assets). Evolve search strategy for emerging trends related to AI search behaviour (AI Overviews, AI Mode Ads). Prepare for new search ad opportunities across ChatGPT and other AI tools.
• Direct Mail Automation & Operations: Find and implement new ways to automate the operational handling of the Mail channel – from campaign coordination, lead delivery to agency and unsubscribe processing. Manage agency relationship and coordinate monthly mailing rounds (200‑400k letters). Monitor tracking setup and attribution (QR codes, mail codes, UTMs into Looker/GA4).
• Product Expansion: Coordinate with product launch teams on go‑to‑market channel strategy, including creative, data, and measurement.
• Model Optimisation Collaboration: Work with our data science team to monitor, refine and channel the performance of the models powering lead selection. Interrogate predictions vs. actuals, flag divergence, push back on assumptions. Translate model outputs into operational decisions: which percentile to mail, what ROI threshold to use, when to pause or expand.
• Other Cross‑Channel: Identify audience overlaps between Mail and Paid Search segments. Support multi‑channel attribution and contribute to iwoca’s broader acquisition strategy.

The Requirements

Essential

• AI‑native: you use AI tools daily to solve real problems – automating workflows, processing data, building things; not just prompting for copy.
• High initiative: you see a manual process and instinctively ask “why isn’t this automated?” You act before being asked.
• Strong critical thinking: you can interrogate data, challenge assumptions, and push back on conclusions that don’t add up.
• Intellectually curious: excited by unfamiliar domains. You’ll need to learn Mail operations, causal modelling, credit‑card mechanics, and emerging search formats – fast.
• Data‑fluent: a data‑driven mindset with the ability to interpret complex data, interpret model outputs and translate them into actionable recommendations.
• Commercially minded: you understand CAC, CLTV, ROI, incrementality – and can translate numbers into business decisions.
• Clear communicator: you will work across data science, engineering, agencies, and senior leadership.
• Organised: you can manage concurrent monthly cadences across multiple channels.

Preferred (not essential)

• Google Ads or paid search experience.
• Fintech or B2B experience.
• Experience working with predictive/ML models commercially.

We are setting an exceptionally high bar for this hire. We’re looking for mechanical sympathy with the systems you’ll work in, very strong critical thinking, and genuine intellectual curiosity. Channel expertise is secondary – we’ll teach you the domain. What we can’t teach is how you think.

The Culture

At iwoca, the best idea wins. We model our culture on independent thinking, challenging untested logic, and evidence‑based decisions. We prioritise learning and growth, and give people the autonomy to develop in the direction that makes them most effective. We’re a tech company and believe in the power of AI to help us work faster and better. We provide the infrastructure where every iwocan always has access to the best models and where those models have access to all of our data. We will help our people to learn how to use and grow with the new tools available to them.

The Offices

Offices in London, Leeds, Berlin, and Frankfurt with plenty of drinks and snacks. Events and community‑led groups, including running groups, padel, and monthly ping‑pong and pool competitions.

The Benefits

• Flexible working hours.
• Medical insurance from Vitality, including discounted gym membership.
• A private GP service (separate from Vitality) for you, your partner, and your dependents.
• 25 days’ holiday per year, an extra day off for your birthday, the option to buy or sell an additional five days of annual leave, and unlimited unpaid leave.
• A one‑month, fully paid sabbatical after four years.
• Instant access to external counselling and therapy sessions for team members that need emotional or mental health support.
• 3 % pension contributions on total earnings.
• An employee equity incentive scheme.
• Generous parental leave and a nursery tax benefit scheme to help you save money.
• Electric car scheme and cycle‑to‑work scheme.
• Two company retreats a year: we’ve been to France, Italy, Spain, and further afield.

And to make sure we all keep learning, we offer:

• A learning and development budget for everyone.
• Company‑wide talks with internal and external speakers.
• Access to learning platforms like Treehouse.

Compensation £35 K – £45 K.