Growth Engineer
Please read first
This is a full-time, in-person role based in San Francisco (Presidio). We work from the office five days a week.
You must be based in the Bay Area or willing to relocate before starting.
We require US work authorization, but are open to O-1 or J-1 visa sponsorship for exceptional candidates.
About Sauna by Wordware
Every tool you use was built as an island, so you became the glue between them. You carry a name from Gmail into the CRM, a time from the CRM into Calendly, a note from Calendly into a doc. AI showed up and mostly became an eleventh window to paste into.
Sauna is a hybrid of AI and software standing on one shared brain. It holds your context and hands you real software built on top of it. You talk to it like a chatbot and use what it builds like an app: software for the path you repeat, AI for the edge that never repeats. Keep it to yourself, or share the brain with your team.
The clearest way to see it is a tool doing what its whole category cannot. An ordinary Calendly shows a stranger your free slots. Your Calendly writes the invite email itself, because it knows how the two of you know each other, and it offers a board member the slot over your gym block, because it knows which of your busy hours bend and for whom.
Wordware is the team behind it, backed by Spark Capital, Felicis and Y Combinator. We build from an office in the Presidio, across from Crissy Field beach.
About the Role
You'll own the engineering that helps people discover Sauna, try it and become customers: the website experiments, tracking, integrations and internal tools behind our growth work.
You'll work closely with our marketers to choose useful experiments, build them and understand the results. That means understanding the product and its economics well enough to question an idea, propose a better approach and explain the tradeoffs. You'll take work from a rough brief through production, testing the customer journey and the data it produces.
Marketing owns campaign strategy, media budgets and creative production. You own the technical systems and measurement those decisions depend on. Product owns activation and retention priorities; you'll partner on instrumentation and experiments that cross into the product.
Your first 30 days
Get close to the product and map how a customer moves from an ad or landing page through signup, meaningful use and payment. Audit the tracking along that path, agree the event definitions with Growth and Product, and fix the gaps that prevent reliable decisions.
Ship a focused website or funnel experiment with its measurement in place. Establish a baseline the team can inspect, including where attribution is incomplete and how trial and inference costs affect acquisition economics.
What You'll Do
Own acquisition tracking end to end. Define meaningful conversion events with Growth and Product, implement browser and server-side tracking, and connect campaign attribution to signups, product usage and payments. Build and maintain integrations with Meta Conversions API, Google Ads conversion tracking and GTM, including consent handling, event deduplication and monitoring.
Ship website and funnel experiments. Build landing pages, forms and conversion flows in TypeScript and React. Work with marketing and design to make the messaging, offer and experience fit Sauna, then test the complete journey across devices before release.
Make the numbers dependable. Use SQL and PostHog to investigate funnels and cohorts. Reconcile ad-platform reports with product and billing data, catch missing or duplicated events, and explain what we can and can't conclude. Include trial and inference costs when evaluating acquisition economics.
Turn hypotheses into tested releases. Choose a success metric and guardrails before shipping, implement experiments, read results with appropriate statistical care, and recommend what to keep, change or stop. Know when traffic is too low for a confident conclusion.
Build tools that remove recurring growth work. Connect our analytics, billing, CRM and marketing systems. Use Sauna and AI coding tools to build useful automations, with clear failure handling and a way for the team to inspect and correct the output.
Own what you ship. Write tests, review generated code, document important decisions and monitor systems after release. Work with product engineers on security and architecture, and keep the growth stack understandable as it changes.
Who You Are
Minimum:
You've shipped production software across frontend, backend and data. You're comfortable with TypeScript/JavaScript, React, APIs, webhooks and SQL, and can diagnose problems across that whole path.
You've implemented conversion tracking and ad-platform integrations yourself. You understand how conversion signals influence campaign optimization and can trace a missing or duplicated event to its source.
You've instrumented an event-based analytics system such as PostHog, and used the data to make a real growth or product decision.
You understand funnels, attribution and acquisition economics. You can explain why you chose a metric, what could mislead you and how you'd check it.
You use AI tools actively and take responsibility for their output. You can explain the code and configuration you ship, verify assumptions and adapt an approach to the product in front of you.
You work independently, communicate clearly with nontechnical teammates and care about the details of the customer experience.
Bonus (but not required):
Experience growing a usage-based product and accounting for trial or inference costs.
Customer-facing tools you've built that generate qualified demand.
Experience shipping technical SEO infrastructure or automating growth operations.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary: $150,000-$250,000, depending on experience and how much of the role you can own from day one, plus meaningful early-stage equity.
Standard Wordware benefits: medical, dental and vision; daily lunch and dinner in the office; 401(k); gym budget; the Presidio office with a sauna and the beach across the road.
How to apply
Tell us about one growth system or experiment you personally built. What did you implement, why did you choose that approach, how did you verify it worked, and what changed as a result? Include a link or concrete evidence where you can, without sharing confidential information.
The Process
Application: Complete the application form and answer the question above. Attaching a resume is optional.
15-minute intro call: Align on location, motivation and logistics.
Technical growth deep-dive: Walk through a system you've built, the decisions behind it and how you verified the results. Work through a growth engineering problem together.
Final conversation: We answer your questions and scope the work trial.
Work trial: Paid, in person, usually a few days to two weeks. Work on a real project with us and see whether the fit works for both sides.