Growth Lead – Creator Program & Paid Social

Candle’s mission is to end loneliness.

We are a daily game designed to help close friends and couples stay emotionally connected. Each day, you and someone you care about unlock a shared random challenge. It could be a thoughtful question, a funny debate, a photo or drawing prompt, a mini-game, even a local date idea or activity.

One shared moment a day to laugh, reflect, and grow together.

We envision a world where everyone is paired with the ~8–9 people who matter most in their lives.

In under 12 months, with a full-time team of just four, we're now at:

• 1m+ users
• $3M+ in annualized revenue

Relationships are the single greatest predictor of long-term health and happiness. We know this from 85 years of Harvard research. And yet there's no product category dedicated to helping people actually build better ones.

Candle is changing that. We're the world’s first relationship fitness app, doing for relationship health what workout apps did for physical fitness. We help couples build stronger, more intentional relationships through daily habits, play, rituals, and check-ins that actually matter.

We crossed 1 million users and $1M ARR in the first 6 months, now over $3M in annual run rate. And we're just getting started.

The Role

We're looking for a Growth Lead to own Candle's creator program, UGC engine, and creator community, and help us scale paid social across TikTok and Meta.

Candle is a product couples love and talk about. The content writes itself. Your job is to build the infrastructure that turns that energy into a compounding acquisition machine, and then run it with real accountability to views, trial starts, and DAU targets.

You'll manage a Discord community of 100+ creators across multiple countries, grow the roster, and build the systems that make the whole thing operate at scale. You'll work directly with the founders. This is one of the most important hires we're making this year.

What You'll Own

Creator Program & UGC Pipeline Own Candle's creator program end-to-end. Develop sourcing strategy, creator personas, and tier structure across markets. Write briefs and scripts that get results. Build the workflows, agreements, payments, feedback cycles, iteration loops, that let us run a high-volume creator operation without things slipping.

Creator Community (Discord) Manage and grow our Discord community of 100+ creators. Keep the roster engaged, informed, and producing. Run challenges, feedback loops, and incentive structures that maintain quality and volume at scale. Identify top performers and build them up. Cull what isn't working.

International Creator Growth Expand the creator roster across new markets and demographics in Spain, Mexico, UK, Germany, France, Korea and Japan. Understand how couple content performs differently across regions and adapt briefing, tone, and formats accordingly. Build systems that let strong ideas travel from one market to another.

Creative Strategy and Viral Sense, You watch five pieces of couple content and immediately know which one will perform and why. You develop winning formats, identify hook patterns, and brief with specificity

Paid Social Own or co-own Candle's paid social on Meta and TikTok. Campaign structure, Spark Ads, whitelisting, audience strategy, budget allocation. You treat creative as the primary variable and manage it accordingly.

Performance & Targets Work alongside the founders to see what drives views, trial starts, installs, CPI, DAU contribution by channel. You run a clean weekly report to get the best creatives each week. You know why something worked and double down.

Reporting & Optimization You'll track what matters: CPM, CTR, install rate, creative performance by format and creator.

What We're Looking For

• You've built or scaled a UGC or creator program at a consumer app, owned it and scaled, not assisted
• You've managed a creator community or large roster (Discord, Slack, or similar) and kept it high-functioning at volume
• You understand creative performance natively: hooks, retention curves, platform culture, format iteration for Tik tok and IG
• You can operate across markets and adapt strategy without losing executional rigor
• Strong analytical instincts, cohort data, funnel conversion, creative performance
• Bonus: Comfortable in Meta Ads Manager and/or TikTok Ads Manager
• Bonus: experience in relationships, wellness, health, fitness, or lifestyle consumer apps

Strong Signals

• You've run a creator roster of 20+ partners and can speak to what made it work
• You've driven measurable growth through UGC, downloads, signups, revenue, or engagement
• You have personal content taste: you know what's good and can articulate why
• You've worked at an early-stage consumer startup and thrive without a playbook

Why Candle

• 1M+ users and $1m+ ARR, $3M annualized in ~1 year.
• A product category with massive cultural tailwinds
• Own the function, build the team, work directly with founders
• $130K–$180K depending on experience + equity

Technologies We Use:

• React Native (Expo) and Swift UI for the client facing app (iOS and Android)
• Convex for the real-time backend (written in Typescript), including all background tasks, queues, cron jobs, and REST APIs
• Anthropic (Claude Opus 4.6), OpenAI (GPT 5.2), and Gemini models to create background agents for tasks like finding local date ideas. We also use Replicate for some image gen models.
• Observability: Posthog for feature flags, Amplitude for analytics, and Sentry for error reporting
• Clerk for user auth(z/n)
• We strongly encourage all candidates to have their own AI setup of choice when coding (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.) to ship faster. Bonus points if you know how to use Git worktrees to speed up your workflow!
• Sample projects of what you could be working on include: overhauling our entire daily notifications setup into a separate reliable microservice, designing and implementing real-time features like a collaborative canvas or a “walkie talkie” feature, creating a recommendation algorithm to dynamically suggest content for couples to explore (this one would be really useful!), etc.