[Hiring] Director, Lifecycle & CRM @Shopify

Role Description

You own Shop's consumer lifecycle program — the system that turns a first Shop Pay checkout or a single order-tracking visit into repeat engagement with Shop and with the brands found on the Shop app.

• Strategy and execution: Define the lifecycle architecture across push and email, plus the segmentation, triggers, offers, and personalization behind it.
• Measurement: Set the standard: always-on holdouts to understand incrementality, and a clear line from any message we send to engagement, order frequency, and merchant GMV.
• Platform: Lead the roadmap with product, data, and engineering to build what the strategy needs (e.g., audience infrastructure, journey orchestration, message prioritization, frequency governance, experimentation).
• The calendar: Buyers get one coherent, well-paced experience, not the sum of everyone's asks. BFCM and holiday peak included.
• Communication: Lifecycle touches nearly every buyer we have and nearly every team at Shop, so this job is as much alignment as craft. Sharp insights with clear communication will help get the right people on board.
• Creative: Push the work past functional. These messages should be worth opening.
• Zero defects: Buyer trust is the asset. A mis-sent message spends it.
• The team: At Shopify everyone is a manager and a doer. Hire and develop a small, senior team while staying deep in the work: determining the strategy, reviewing the copy, reading the query, shipping the campaign. Put AI agents to work across the lifecycle stack.

Qualifications

• ~15 years in lifecycle marketing, CRM, growth, or retention, including experience leading teams and developing senior individual contributors.
• Track record owning a consumer lifecycle program at scale — hundreds of millions of users, multiple channels (push, email) — with accountability for engagement, frequency, or retention targets, not just campaign delivery.
• Deep measurement fluency: you have built holdout and incrementality frameworks, can defend them to a skeptical audience, and can write your own SQL.
• Experience specifying and shipping lifecycle platform capability with product and engineering partners — CDP/audience infrastructure, journey orchestration, event pipelines, experimentation.
• Demonstrated zero-defect operating discipline in high-volume consumer messaging, and the systems and rituals to sustain it.
• Strong creative judgment; a portfolio of work that people actually enjoyed receiving.
• Experience in consumer marketplace, commerce, fintech, or payments; comfort with two-sided dynamics where buyer engagement is also merchant value.
• Working knowledge of consumer messaging compliance and consent management across multiple markets.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication: you can compress a complex program into a one-page memo an executive acts on, and hold your own in a leadership review.
• Proven ability to drive alignment across product, brand, creative, data, legal, and regional teams — representing lifecycle in planning and investment decisions, not just participating in them.
• Bonus: experience in loyalty or rewards currencies, international/multi-market lifecycle programs.

Requirements

• Contactability and consent as a growth asset: permission rates, opt-in strategy, list health, deliverability, and sending reputation.
• Message governance: frequency capping, prioritization, and a single global lifecycle calendar, coordinated with merchant marketing, brand, and paid media teams.
• Creative partnership and quality bar for all lifecycle communications, including localization for international markets.
• Program forecasting and regular business reporting to Shop and Growth leadership.
• Compliance and privacy posture for consumer messaging (GDPR, CASL, CAN-SPAM, TCPA, platform push policies), in partnership with Legal and Privacy.
• Executive and cross-org communication: the narrative, forecasts, and results that go to Shop, Growth, and Shopify leadership, and the alignment across product, brand, creative, merchant marketing, data, legal, and international that lifecycle depends on.
• Team: hiring, developing, and leading a senior, high-leverage lifecycle and CRM team.