[Hiring] Associate Director, Paid Social @Dept

Role Description

As an Associate Director, Paid Social, you are a strategic paid media leader with a proven ability to manage complex, full-funnel paid social programs end to end. You excel at developing and executing advanced paid social strategies, building and leading high-performing teams, and translating performance insights into clear, compelling roadmaps and client-ready narratives. Your leadership blends analytical rigor, creative thinking, and a relentless focus on performance excellence—driving both client success and sustainable agency growth.

As a trusted mentor and collaborative leader, you foster strong team cohesion and unlock individual potential through hands-on coaching and thoughtful guidance. You take a deep-dive approach to onboarding and development, helping new team members quickly understand client priorities, business objectives, platform best practices, and creative testing frameworks. In this role, you set the standard for paid social excellence—driving profitability, elevating strategic thinking, and empowering teams to consistently deliver outstanding results.

DEPT is a remote-first organization. For this role, we’re looking for someone located in the Pacific or Mountain time zone to align with team and client schedules.

What You’ll Do

• Lead channel-specific Paid Social strategy across Meta Ads, TikTok, Snapchat, and Reddit, leveraging deep expertise in it to drive growth for client KPIs.
• Serve as the day-to-day contact for Meta Ads for a large and complex client account, aligning strategy recommendations and optimizations with client objectives.
• Own the Meta Ads client’s social account roadmap, ensuring tests align with client priorities, performance goals, creative strategy, and cross-channel initiatives.
• Stay up to date on paid social trends and maintain a consistent strategic narrative to the client and how the trends impact client business goals.
• Establish, enforce, and evolve paid social processes and best practices, ensuring consistent use of tools such as Asana, platform QA frameworks, and internal standards across teams.
• Ensure projects and tests are properly prioritized based on resourcing through clear dialogue across team members and the client.
• Serve as the senior point person for the internal team and client around test recommendations, proper set-up and measurement to ensure results are measurable and applicable in order to grow performance.
• Build, develop, and lead high-performing teams by overseeing onboarding, driving effective delegation, coaching people managers, and fostering inclusive, collaborative, and high-impact team environments.

Qualifications

• A minimum of 5 years paid social advertising and minimum 2 years experience in management.
• A proven track record of successfully scaling paid social programs for enterprise level or highly complex clients.
• Deeply proficient in Meta Ads Manager and skilled at effectively communicating paid social goals, targets, and direct-response tactics to clients.
• Proven experience planning, launching, and optimizing full-funnel paid social campaigns, including setting up and analyzing brand lift studies.
• Excellent organizational, strategic, and communication skills.
• Demonstrated ability to foster a collaborative, inclusive, and high-performing team culture.
• Proven capability to develop and execute strategic paid social plans that align with client objectives and drive measurable business growth.
• Strong problem-solving skills and adaptability in navigating evolving platforms, market conditions, and client needs.
• You are located in PST or MT timezone.

Additional Things That Will Impress Us

• Proven experience launching new channels and building accounts from scratch, including setup, testing, and scaling to meet performance goals.
• Hands-on experience planning, launching, and optimizing paid social campaigns on emerging platforms such as Reddit and X.

Benefits

• DEPT® is an equal opportunity employer (EOE).
• Commitment to an inclusive and barrier-free recruitment and selection process.
• B Corp-certified company passionate about purpose-driven work.

Company Description

DEPT® is a pioneering technology and marketing services company that creates integrated end-to-end digital experiences for brands such as Google, KFC, Philips, Audi, Twitch, Patagonia, eBay and more. Its team of 2,500+ digital specialists across 30+ locations on 5 continents delivers pioneering work on a global scale with a boutique culture.