Growth Lead, AI Engineering

About AI EngineeringAI Engineering is a technical media brand focused on ML, LLMs, AI agents, developer tools, and the infrastructure behind modern AI systems.

We currently have 25K+ newsletter subscribers and a growing audience across LinkedIn and X.

Our goal over the next 12 months is to grow the newsletter to 100K+ high-quality subscribers while maintaining solid engagement and building AI Engineering into a much larger technical media business.

About the RoleWe’re hiring a Growth Lead to own audience growth for AI Engineering.

This is not a newsletter editing role.

Your primary job is to figure out how we grow from 25K to 100K+ subscribers through organic acquisition, paid acquisition, partnerships, referrals, distribution, lead magnets, and new growth experiments.

You’ll work closely with the founder and have a lot of freedom to test ideas, build systems, and double down on what works.

We care less about following an established growth playbook and much more about whether you can understand the audience, find opportunities, move quickly, and consistently grow the right kind of subscribers.

What You’ll OwnSubscriber growth

- Own the overall newsletter growth target
- Build a clear view of where subscriber growth is coming from
- Identify the highest-leverage acquisition channels
- Track net subscriber growth and subscriber quality
- Understand what is working, what is not, and what we should test next
- Grow the audience without sacrificing engagement or relevance

Organic growth
- Build growth loops across LinkedIn, X, Reddit, communities, and other relevant channels
- Work with our content team to turn existing content into subscriber acquisition
- Identify technical resources, guides, reports, benchmarks, and lead magnets that could drive signups
- Improve distribution around every major piece of content
- Find better ways to leverage the founder’s existing audience and AI Engineering’s social presence

Paid acquisition
- Test and scale paid subscriber acquisition
- Identify the right channels, audiences, creatives, and landing pages
- Track CAC and subscriber quality by source
- Improve conversion rates across paid acquisition funnels
- Know when a channel deserves more budget and when it should be stopped
- Build a paid acquisition engine that can scale without destroying audience quality

Partnerships and cross-promotions
- Build relationships with newsletters, creators, communities, and technical media brands
- Run newsletter swaps, recommendation partnerships, cross-promotions, and other acquisition collaborations
- Identify partners that already reach engineers, technical founders, AI builders, and developer audiences
- Turn successful collaborations into repeatable acquisition channels

Referral and growth loops
- Build and improve newsletter referral programs
- Test incentives, sharing loops, recommendation systems, and subscriber-driven growth
- Find ways for existing readers to naturally bring in more readers




- Measure which loops generate genuinely engaged subscribers

Funnel, retention, and conversion
- Improve newsletter landing pages and signup conversion
- Build and test lead magnets
- Improve welcome flows and subscriber onboarding
- Understand subscriber quality by acquisition source
- Track open rates, CTR, unsubscribes, inactive subscribers, and deliverability
- Work with the content team to maintain engagement as the audience gets larger

Growth experiments
- Continuously find and test new ways to grow
- Build hypotheses, run experiments, measure results, and make decisions quickly
- Explore new acquisition channels before they become crowded
- Document what works and turn successful experiments into repeatable systems
- Use AI and automation wherever they can improve research, execution, analysis, or speed

What We’re Looking ForWe care much more about what you can show than what is written on your resume.

You should have

- Evidence that you have grown something, whether that is a newsletter, audience, community, social account, product, media property, or another distribution channel
- Strong ownership and the ability to move work forward without constant follow-up
- Curiosity about why things grow and why they stop growing
- Comfort experimenting across organic, paid, partnerships, referrals, and other channels
- Strong analytical thinking and comfort working with growth metrics
- Good judgment around when to scale something and when to stop
- Strong written communication
- The ability to figure things out without waiting for a detailed playbook
- Genuine interest in AI, developer tools, and technical audiences

Nice to Have

- Experience growing a newsletter from tens of thousands of subscribers to a significantly larger audience
- Hands-on experience with paid newsletter acquisition
- Experience with newsletter or creator partnerships
- Experience building referral programs
- Experience with beehiiv, Substack, ConvertKit, or similar newsletter platforms
- Experience building lead magnets or technical resources
- Experience working with creators, developer communities, or technical media
- Understanding of newsletter sponsorships and monetization
- Experience building lightweight AI or automation workflows around growth

What Success Looks LikeThe main outcome is simple:

Grow AI Engineering from 25K subscribers to 100K+ while maintaining a high-quality technical audience and strong engagement.

At any point, you should be able to tell us:

- how many subscribers we added
- where they came from
- what each acquisition channel costs
- which sources produce the strongest readers
- what experiments are working
- what is not working




- what we should test next

We don’t want growth purely for a bigger subscriber number. We want to build a much larger audience of engineers, technical founders, AI builders, and people who genuinely care about AI engineering.

What We Offer

- Direct ownership of a growing technical media property
- Work closely with the founder
- Freedom to test organic, paid, partnership, and product-led growth ideas
- Access to an existing audience across newsletter, LinkedIn, and X
- Budget for acquisition, tools, experiments, and partnerships
- Significant room to shape the role as AI Engineering grows
- Fully remote work
- Flexible hours
- High trust and high ownership

Before You ApplyPlease do not use LinkedIn Easy Apply. Easy Apply applications will not be reviewed.

We care much more about what you have actually grown, built, tested, and owned than your degree, job title, or how polished your resume looks.

If you’re interested, email [email protected] with:

- a short introduction
- your LinkedIn profile or resume, if you have one
- something you have personally helped grow, whether that is a newsletter, audience, community, product, social account, media property, or another distribution channel
- what you personally did and what changed because of your work
- why growing AI Engineering specifically is interesting to you

More importantly, show us your work and how you think.

That could be

- a short Loom walking through a newsletter, audience, or growth system you built
- subscriber or audience growth numbers and what drove them
- screenshots of experiments, funnels, campaigns, referral systems, partnerships, or paid acquisition you worked on
- a breakdown of a growth experiment you ran, what happened, what failed, and what you changed
- a quick analysis of how you would approach growing AI Engineering from 25K to 100K subscribers
- anything else that gives us a clear sense of how you operate

You do not need to create a polished application. We’re looking for people who show curiosity, ownership, and initiative from the first interaction. If you find a better way to demonstrate that than the examples above, even better.

One Last ThingThis role is not limited by years of experience, degrees, or traditional career paths.

You could be a student, recent graduate, dropout, independent creator, growth operator, or someone who has built something of your own.

What matters is whether you can show:

- strong ownership
- curiosity and urgency
- good judgment
- willingness to experiment
- comfort working with numbers
- the ability to figure things out without waiting for a playbook
- genuine interest in building and growing AI Engineering

If you have grown something meaningful, built your own audience, experimented obsessively with distribution, or simply have unusually strong evidence that you can figure this out, we want to hear from you. We care less about what you have been called before and much more about what you can take ownership of next.

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