Lifecycle Marketing Manager

Role Summary

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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• 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 http://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.

About the Company

ABOUT SLEEPER

Sleeper is on a mission to connect people over sports through games and community. As one of the fastest-growing platforms in the fantasy sports and real-money gaming space, we’re redefining how sports fans engage—whether it’s through season-long leagues, pick’em contests, or real-time interactions with friends.

Our team is lean, passionate, and product-driven. We obsess over user experience and believe that building delightful, fast, and reliable products is the best way to grow. Backed by some of the most respected investors in Silicon Valley, including Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst, we're building the future of sports engagement.

WHY JOIN SLEEPER?

Massive Impact – Your work will touch millions of users and help shape the next generation of sports entertainment.

High Ownership – We trust our engineers to make high-leverage decisions and drive meaningful outcomes.

Startup Agility – Move fast, ship often, and see your work in the hands of users quickly.

Culture-First Team – We’re a team of builders, thinkers, and sports lovers who value humility, collaboration, and having fun along the way.