Founding Deployment Strategist: Tier 1.5 Consulting + Digital Ads (Oliver Wyman, L.E.K., Kearney, Strategy&, EY-Parthenon) | New York City (On-site) | Up to $250K + Founding Equity

Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads.Doc Brown, Back to the Future

Oliver Wyman, L.E.K., Kearney, Roland Berger, Strategy&, Monitor Deloitte or EY-Parthenon? Moved into digital ads? This founding role wants both.

You don't need a McKinsey, BCG or Bain badge for this one. If you trained at a top strategy firm and then got your hands dirty in performance marketing, our client wants to talk to you.

Our client is a well-funded, seed-stage, AI-first startup in New York building an agentic performance marketing platform for consumer brands. Its AI agents run paid campaigns end to end across Google, Meta, Amazon, TikTok and more: research, creative, media buying and around-the-clock optimisation. The founders are ex-Google. One launched an AI ads product inside Google and grew it from zero to more than $500M in revenue a year; the other put production AI live at Google Research. High-growth consumer brands are already paying customers.

They now need their first customer-facing strategist: someone who can run a CMO meeting like a consulting engagement manager and audit an ad account like a performance marketer.

Up to $250K base + founding equity. 5 days a week on-site, Financial District, Manhattan.

Tier 1.5 firms we'd love to hear from

Oliver Wyman

L.E.K. Consulting

Kearney

Roland Berger

Strategy& (PwC)

Monitor Deloitte

EY-Parthenon

Simon-Kucher (especially pricing, growth and commercial work)

ZS Associates (especially marketing analytics and commercial strategy)

Prophet (especially brand, marketing and growth strategy)

McKinsey, BCG and Bain alumni are of course welcome too.

What you'll do

Own a portfolio of consumer brand accounts and become their trusted adviser on paid media

Present performance to CMOs, CEOs and CFOs, turning complex ad data into clear decisions

Dig into Google, Meta and Amazon ad accounts: audit them, find wasted spend and spot growth opportunities

Explain what the AI agents are doing and why, and feed what you learn from customers back into the product

Build the deployment function from scratch, with a clear path to hiring and leading a team

What you'll bring

Top-tier strategy consulting experience at one of the Tier 1.5 firms above (or MBB), where you learned to structure problems, build the numbers and win over senior executives

Digital ads experience after consulting: performance marketing, paid media, growth or ads-adjacent work, ideally at a high-growth consumer brand, an e-commerce business, an adtech company or the ads side of a major platform

Comfort with the metrics: ROAS, CPA, CAC, LTV and incrementality, and the judgment to know what to do when the numbers move

Hands-on ad account skills in Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager or Amazon Ads are a big plus

You build with AI: you tinker with tools like Claude Code, Codex or ChatGPT to automate your own work, and you're excited to work alongside AI agents every day

A STEM degree and/or a top school

The package

Up to $250K base

Founding equity as one of the first hires

401(k), medical, dental and vision

5 days a week on-site in the Financial District, Manhattan, with a small, sharp team. Relocation to New York is welcome.

US work authorization required; visa transfers considered for exceptional candidates

Why this role

A genuine founding seat: you'll shape how an AI-first company works with its customers

Learn from founders who built a $500M+ a year ads product inside Google

Paying customers, serious funding and a product that's already working

Your consulting toolkit and your ads experience, finally in one role

Tier 1.5 consulting plus digital ads is a rare combination. If you have it, apply now. If you know someone who does, send this their way.