About Certus
We sit at the intersection of people and technology—building training and education solutions that help more than 4 million learners each year enter, advance, or reinvent their careers.
Our customers are some of the world's most recognized brands: Amazon, Siemens, Geico, Chick-fil-A, and others who trust us to develop their people at scale.
How We Work
Our teams span software engineering, instructional design, creative writing, consultative sales, marketing, and beyond. Movement between roles isn't just possible; it's encouraged. We're building something that requires people who want to keep growing.
Who Thrives Here
Self-starters who bring a get-it-done mindset and don't wait for permission
Builders drawn to a fast-moving industry where the landscape keeps shifting
Humans who are innovative, brave, kind, and bring their full selves to work
The workforce learning market is evolving rapidly, and we're defining where it goes next. If you want work that matters, room to grow, and a team that means it when they talk about culture—we should talk.
Position Overview:
This is the senior operator and senior leader of Certus's PPC function. You own performance across a multi-brand, multi-vertical portfolio, and you lead a team of six PPC managers across three levels of seniority. The Director of Digital Marketing sets the vision and the where-next; you make sure the function actually gets there, with coherence, accountability, and craft.
The scope is meaningful. You'll oversee paid search across roughly 100 domains, five verticals, and $26M in annual spend, with that figure expected to grow. Several of those verticals operate in regulated industries, which shapes everything from claim language to landing page strategy. The decisions you make compound.
This role asks for range. You operate at the strategy table, you lead and develop people, and when the team's capacity is genuinely constrained, you step in and execute at the platform level alongside them. You are the connective tissue between vision and execution, and between your team's day-to-day reality and leadership's strategic intent.
Performance Mandate:
You are fully accountable for the performance of the PPC function:
Profit, revenue, ROAS, and pacing across all verticals and brands
Budget allocation and forecasting at the vertical level
Channel innovation: new campaign types, platform features, AI-enabled testing, automation
Vertical-specific playbooks built in partnership with Product, PMM, SEO, Social, CRM, and Analytics
QA, governance, and measurement integrity that protect spend and brand standards
Executive reporting that ties PPC results to business outcomes, not just channel metrics
Technical and Strategic Depth:
You bring real expertise across the full PPC stack: account architecture, bidding strategy, audience design, creative testing, attribution, cross-channel integration, and platform-level mechanics on Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and adjacent platforms. You can articulate a campaign-level vision, and you can also open the platform and work in it directly.
You think in systems. You see how PPC interacts with SEO, paid social, lifecycle, and product, and you actively shape that integration rather than waiting for it to be assigned.
Data agility is part of the craft here. The team works in Python regularly to pull, shape, and analyze data at the speed the business needs. We don't expect every candidate to walk in fluent on day one. We have an internal Confluence-based training path the whole team has been through, and what used to take roughly a year of self-teaching now takes about two weeks. What we do expect is the appetite and the aptitude to build that capability quickly. Data agility is foundational to how this team operates and how we stay ahead of the work.
Leading the Team:
You lead six PPC managers spanning three levels. Your job is to develop strategic thinkers, not just task-doers.
You coach as much as you manage. Each direct report should be visibly developing under you. You calibrate challenge and support to the level in front of you.
Career growth is part of the deliverable. You know each person's aspirations and you actively help build the path forward.
Culture is part of the deliverable. The team's tone, sense of ownership, and pride in the work all reflect your leadership.
Operational familiarity matters. You know the routines, platforms, dashboards, recurring meetings, reporting cadences, and process details that keep this team moving. That familiarity is what lets you support people well and notice early when something needs attention.
Coherence and Alignment Across Levels:
The function works best when alignment cascades cleanly from organization, to Director, to you, to your managers, to their ICs. Helping hold that coherence is a core part of your job.
You notice when things begin to drift and address it before it grows
You translate strategic intent into role clarity, priorities, and operating rhythms your team can act on
You bring the same discipline cross-functionally, so PPC's part of any shared project lands cleanly
You raise gaps early (resourcing, tooling, alignment) so the Director can clear the blocker or escalate it
You bring structure where there's ambiguity. Operating standards, testing frameworks, communication norms, and handoff protocols all improve under your leadership.