Location: Remote [United States]
Salary: $220k-275k, OTE: $280-350k
About Clever
Clever is a venture-backed real estate technology company on a mission to revolutionize the way people buy, sell, and manage real estate. We've helped over 30,000 homeowners sell their homes while saving thousands in fees, and we're just getting started. With a strong foundation in real estate, we're aggressively expanding through vertical integration, building a suite of adjacent businesses that serve customers at every step of the home transaction journey.
We've built the leading online education platform in real estate and earned a 4.9 TrustPilot rating with over 3,800 reviews - helping consumers save over $210 million in real estate fees. If you're excited to play a key role at a company that transforms how people navigate their real estate journey, we'd love to hear from you!
Role Overview
We're hiring a VP of Paid Media to own Clever's growth across every paid channel: Google, Meta, TikTok, ChatGPT Ads, and whatever emerges next. This role reports to the President and partners closely with our VP of Marketing, Sales leadership, and Product.
This is an IC-first role: you'll build the paid media department from the ground up.
You'll start as the operator, not the org-chart executive. For at least the first six months, you will personally:
- Live in the ad accounts every day: building campaigns, restructuring accounts, adjusting bids and budgets, and diagnosing performance at the ad level.
- Write and iterate ad scripts using AI tools as a core part of your daily workflow.
- Design and produce new ad creative with AI. You generate the volume and variety yourself, not through a creative team.
- Recruit, brief, and manage a network of freelance UGC creators to feed your creative pipeline.
- You'll build and prove the systems first, then earn the right to scale them with headcount.
We expect your first full-time hire around the six-month mark, once the playbook is working. Until then, your freelance creator network is your leverage. If your best work happens hands-on in the accounts, and you want the executive seat, budget authority, and mandate to build a team around what you've personally proven — this is that role.
Key Responsibilities:
- Personally manage Clever's paid accounts day to day: campaign builds, account structure, budgets, bidding, and ad-level optimization across Google, Meta, TikTok, ChatGPT Ads, and emerging channels.
- Run a high-velocity creative engine yourself: develop ad scripts with AI, produce net-new ad concepts and statics with AI tooling, and ship a steady cadence of creative tests every week.
- Source and manage freelance UGC creators: write the briefs, give the feedback, and build the roster into a reliable creative supply chain.
- Own the entire paid customer journey (ad creative, audience targeting, landing pages, on-page experience, lifecycle email and SMS follow-up, and conversion to qualified pipeline), not just the ad itself.
- Take full accountability for growth and ROAS across all paid channels.
- Build, test, and codify a repeatable system for launching, scaling, and pruning channels, so that when you do hire, new team members plug into a proven playbook instead of a blank page.
- Set the analytics and attribution standard for paid: define the KPIs, the dashboards, and the rituals that keep leadership aligned on what's actually driving profitable growth.
- Stay on the leading edge of paid channels, ad formats, and AI tooling. Bring new bets to the table and have a strong opinion on which ones are worth Clever's time and dollars.
- Once the systems are proven: design and hire the in-house team, and scale the playbook you built.
What Success Looks Like:
In 6 months…
- You've fully audited Clever's paid accounts and personally rebuilt what needed rebuilding, with a clear record of what you scaled, fixed, or killed.
- You're shipping a high, consistent cadence of AI-produced creative and UGC tests every week, and you can show which tests moved ROAS.
- You've built a working roster of freelance UGC creators with a repeatable brief-produce-launch pipeline.
- Monthly paid spend has grown meaningfully while holding or improving ROAS, driven by work you did with your own hands.
- Your systems and playbook are documented well enough that your first hire could plug into them, and you're now making the case for that hire.
In 12 months…
- At least two new channels have matured into profitable, scaled growth drivers.
- Monthly paid spend has grown materially with disciplined ROAS across every channel.
- You've made your first hire (or first few) against the proven playbook, and you're still close enough to the accounts to catch what the dashboards miss.
- The full funnel (ads, landers, lifecycle, conversion) is under constant test, in tight partnership with Sales.
- Clever's paid function is recognized as one of the highest-performing in our category.
Ideal Candidate
- 10+ years in paid marketing, and still hands-on today. You currently build campaigns, write creative, and work inside ad accounts yourself; you don't just review your team's work.
- Has personally managed million-dollar monthly paid budgets at companies where every dollar had to return a measurable, profitable outcome.
- Deep expertise in Google and Meta; strong fluency across TikTok and other emerging paid channels.
- AI-native in daily practice: you already use AI tools to write scripts, generate ad creative, research audiences, and analyze performance, and you can show recent examples.
- Experience sourcing and managing freelance creators (UGC or similar) as a creative supply chain.
- Comfortable owning the full funnel, from ad to landing page to lifecycle, with a portfolio of examples where you improved conversion across the entire customer experience, not just the click.
- Bias toward building systems and testing playbooks, not just running campaigns. You prove it works before you ask for headcount.
- Excellent communication skills, able to influence across teams and levels.
- Real estate, fintech, or marketplace industry experience a plus.
What We Offer
Salary: $220k–275k, OTE: $280–350k with upside potential for overperformance
Comprehensive Benefits: Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance
Paid Time Off: 18 days of PTO (increases with tenure) plus 10 paid holidays
Professional Development: Annual budget for learning and career growth
Tenure Sabbaticals: Paid sabbaticals to celebrate major milestones
Clever Product Benefit: Exclusive access to Clever homeownership perks
Work-From-Home Stipend: Support for your remote workspace
401(k): Retirement plan administered through Guideline
Parental Leave: 6–12 weeks of paid parental leave
Wellness Benefits: Free counseling sessions and optional weekly meditation
Equal Employment Opportunity Employer Statement:
Clever Real Estate provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.