Head of Growth

⚠️ Please read first

• This is a full-time, in-person role based in San Francisco (Presidio) - we work from the office 5 days a week.

• You must be based in the Bay Area or willing to relocate before starting.

• We require US work authorization , but are open to O-1 or J-1 visa sponsorship for exceptional candidates.

About Sauna by Wordware

Most AI products hand you a coworker on day one and hope you trust it. Sauna is the coworker you raise: it starts by learning how you work, earns autonomy task by task, and ends up running hours of work on its own while you keep taste, review, and the final say. Wordware is the ~20-person team behind it, backed by Spark Capital, Felicis, and Y Combinator with a $30M seed, the largest in YC history. We build from a San Francisco office in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge, and we work absurdly hard because we can see and feel the outcome every day.

About the Role:

We're looking for a Head of Growth to own Sauna's path from thousands of users to millions. You'll be the first dedicated growth hire and the person who builds the machine from scratch, then builds the team to run it. You'll report to the CEO, on a team of ~20 in SF. This is a senior role, it's for someone who has run growth end to end before, not a first growth job.

The playbook: own the full consumer growth stack yourself first. Once channels prove out, you hire: a PMM/copy person (copy is the key skill here, not technical ability), a frontend-leaning engineer for programmatic SEO and the explore page, and a motion designer whose aesthetic is Johnny Harris, not generic corporate explainer videos. You use Sauna to make viral content. That's the job.

Product growth (activation, onboarding) stays in the product team. This role is everything that drives people to the door. You should already know this playbook cold. If a lot of the below is new to you, this probably isn't your role.

What You'll Do:

• Own the full consumer growth stack: social virality, programmatic SEO, paid ads, sponsorships and newsletters, affiliates, invite virality, engineering as marketing, content, courses, university partnerships

• Build viral loops in-product and out that compound over time

• Run and iterate on paid channels: Google Ads, social ads, sponsorships, newsletters. Use an agency for paid ads initially, don't hire in-house yet.

• Build a content engine. Dog food Sauna to show what the product can do.

• Own programmatic SEO and partner with engineering to build it. The ROI is disproportionate: 50K page views from one week of engineering time.

• Run outreach to accelerators, universities, and AI communities for bulk activation

• Hire and lead the growth team as channels prove out: PMM/copy person first, then frontend engineer, then motion designer

Who You Are:

Minimum:

• Have done this before. Run growth at a fast-moving startup, owned a channel from zero to meaningful scale.

• Write exceptionally well. Punchy, specific, opinionated copy that converts. The PMM/copy person you'll hire is only as good as your brief.

• Know the AI content landscape cold. What's working on X, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok right now.

• Have viral intuition: what makes people share, what makes products loop.

• Be able to run a launch end-to-end: positioning, copy, social, email, video brief.

• Be technical enough to partner with engineering on SEO without needing a ticket for every request.

• Know exactly who to hire, in what order, and why. You've built a growth team before.

Bonus (but not required):

• Scaled a consumer product to 100K+ users in a noisy, competitive market

• Built a growth team from scratch and know exactly what that first hire looks like

• A strong copy portfolio: viral posts, landing pages, email campaigns that performed

• Shipped programmatic SEO with an engineering partner

• Relationships with creators, newsletters, or AI community distribution channels

• Already using Sauna or similar AI tools as a core part of how you work, not as a novelty

Compensation & Benefits:

Base salary: $180K–$240K + meaningful early-stage equity + health, dental, 401(k), considerable PTO, gym budget, lunch.

The Process:

We keep our process simple. Exceptional candidates go from first touch to offer within 2 weeks.

1. Application: Submit your resume and answer a few short questions.

2. 15-minute intro call: Quick check to align on location, motivation, and logistics. If it's a go, we move fast from here.

3. Growth deep-dive: Walk through a channel you owned zero-to-scale and how you would approach ours.

4. Final conversation: We answer your questions and scope out the work trial.

5. Work trial: Paid, in person, usually a few days to two weeks. You work on a real project with us. See how we work, see if it fits, both sides.