Paid Acquisition Lead, Consumer

Toast creates technology to help restaurants and local businesses succeed in a digital world, helping business owners operate, increase sales, engage customers, and keep employees happy.

As a Digital Acquisition Lead on the Consumer team at Toast, you will own and scale our external acquisition strategy to drive awareness, adoption, and engagement of the Toast Local app while generating meaningful demand for Toast restaurants. You’ll lead the planning, execution, and optimization of high-impact digital campaigns across paid social, paid search, influencer, and referral channels.

You are a hands-on, agile, performance-minded marketer who thrives in fast-moving environments and enjoys balancing creativity with analytical rigor. You’re comfortable owning strategy and execution end-to-end, collaborating deeply across teams, and using customer insight and performance data to continuously refine how we reach and engage consumers. This is a high-ownership role where your work will directly influence consumer growth, brand, engagement, retention, and value for Toast restaurants.

The Consumer Growth initiative is an ambitious startup within Toast that partners closely with Product, Marketing, Lifecycle, Design, Brand, Data/Analytics, and Engineering to build scalable, consumer-first growth engines. Your role is crucial to fulfill our mission to connect guests with great local restaurants through thoughtful, efficient, and brand-aligned acquisition strategies that compound over time.

A day in the life (Responsibilities)

• Lead the planning, development, and optimization of consumer acquisition campaigns across paid social, paid search, influencer, and referral channels.
• Launch and scale campaigns that drive Toast Local app installs, engagement, and repeat usage while lifting demand for Toast restaurants.
• Translate growth goals into clear campaign strategies, creative briefs, and channel plans in partnership with design, content, and brand teams.
• Balance near-term performance goals with longer-term brand and product-led growth considerations.
• Own channel-level strategy, budgets, pacing, and performance across digital acquisition programs.
• Test, iterate, and scale seasonal, regional, and audience-specific programs that connect consumers with local restaurants.
• Identify, evaluate, and pilot emerging channels and acquisition tactics to expand Toast’s consumer growth toolkit.
• Develop repeatable playbooks and best practices that improve efficiency and scalability over time.
• Partner closely with Toast’s Brand and B2B Marketing teams to ensure consumer acquisition efforts complement and strengthen the broader Toast narrative.
• Collaborate with Product and Lifecycle Marketing to deliver cohesive, personalized acquisition-to-engagement journeys.
• Share insights and learnings from acquisition efforts to inform product decisions, lifecycle strategy, and company-wide growth planning.

Customer Insight & Advocacy

• Engage directly with consumers and incorporate qualitative insights into campaign strategy, messaging, and channel selection.
• Translate customer feedback and behavioral signals into actionable improvements across acquisition programs.
• Champion the consumer perspective to ensure marketing efforts create value for both guests and Toast restaurants.

Measurement, Experimentation & Optimization

• Define, monitor, and optimize against key acquisition and growth metrics such as CAC, CTR, conversion rates, app installs, activation, and engagement.
• Partner with Analytics to design experiments, evaluate results, and continuously improve channel performance.
• Deliver clear reporting, insights, and recommendations to Consumer Growth, Product, and senior leadership stakeholders.

What you’ll need to thrive (Requirements)

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree with 5+ years of experience in digital acquisition, performance marketing, and/or consumer growth roles.
• Experience building scalable acquisition marketing campaigns in fast growing consumer (B2C) companies (bonus points for experience with tech companies)
• Relevant hands-on experience managing mobile ad campaigns (Apple, Play), paid social (Meta, TikTok, etc.) and paid search (Google Ads, Bing), with exposure to influencer and referral programs.
• Comfort orchestrating campaigns, copy and creative – sometimes from scratch – to run experiments and identify high performing ad units 
• Strong analytical mindset with a proven ability to translate performance data into clear decisions and improved outcomes.
• Experience owning budgets, pacing, forecasting, and performance accountability across multiple channels.
• Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills, with the ability to influence across and up.
• Comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-paced environments and building new programs from the ground up.

 

AI at Toast

At Toast, one of our company values is that we're hungry to build and learn. We believe learning new AI tools empowers us to build for our customers faster, more independently, and with higher quality. We provide these tools across all disciplines, from Engineering and Product to Sales and Support, and are inspired by how our Toasters are already driving real value with them. The people who thrive here are those who embrace changes that let us build more for our customers; it’s a core part of our culture.

Our Total Rewards Philosophy 
We strive to provide competitive compensation and benefits programs that help to attract, retain, and motivate the best and brightest people in our industry. Our total rewards package goes beyond great earnings potential and provides the means to a healthy lifestyle with the flexibility to meet Toasters’ changing needs. Learn more about our benefits at https://careers.toasttab.com/toast-benefits.