Product Operations - Brand Partnerships

Substack is building a new economic engine for culture, giving the brightest, most interesting, and most creative people on the internet the power of their own publishing platform. Substack empowers independent writers, artists, videographers, podcasters, and creators of all types to create, share, and make a living off their work through subscriptions, while offering them creative freedom, ownership, and a direct connection to their audiences.

Brand Partnerships at Substack

We're building Substack's sponsorships business from the ground up. The Implementation Lead makes campaigns scale into a marketplace. You own the operational backbone of the business: campaign workflows, integrations/operations, and marketplace quality that makes it all happen. When a brand’s ad ops team and solutions engineers need to understand each other, you're the translator. This is a founding role on a small team and a build role.

Responsibilities

• Own trafficking, QA, launch, delivery monitoring for custom sponsorship formats

• Execute on the pipes for the business: order management, campaign workflows, reporting, and billing handoffs

• Implement and maintain the integrations brands expect — tracking, third-party measurement, verification — adapted to formats that standard tags and pixels weren't built for

• Serve as first-line solutions lead for brands and agencies operating in the marketplace, and be the translator when their ad ops team needs to understand how our formats actually work

• Work with design and engineering to decide what deserves real tooling now versus what stays a manual workaround until there's volume to justify automating it

• Contribute to an AI-first outbound and onboarding engine to drive demand into the marketplace

• Write the playbooks and documentation — since for custom formats, the playbook usually doesn't exist until you write it

About You

• 10+ years in ad operations, solutions engineering, or technical account management at a platform, publisher, or ad tech company

• Hands-on experience with campaign trafficking, tag management, and third-party measurement or verification vendors — and comfort when the format doesn't fit the vendor's assumptions

• Fluency with data: strong spreadsheet skills at minimum, SQL and scripting a real advantage, and the judgment to know when a number looks wrong

• Experience sitting in on sales calls to answer technical questions and scope feasibility on custom or unfamiliar formats in real time

• The range to debug a delivery discrepancy with an agency in the morning and spec an internal tool with an engineer in the afternoon

• An operator's instinct for process: you build systems that scale without over-engineering before there's volume to justify it

• Familiarity with how creator sponsorships are sold, delivered, and measured is a plus

• Experience with APIs, workflow automation, or light scripting (Python, JavaScript) is a plus

Substack’s compensation package includes a market-competitive salary, equity for all full-time roles, and exceptional benefits. Our cash compensation salary range for this role is $250,000 - $300,000. Multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, determine final offer amounts and may vary from the amounts listed above.

Substack is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or transgender status), age, national origin, veteran or disability status. We’re seeking people passionate about enabling independent expression and building a better business model for creators. If you want to see what media, communities, and content can become when unmoored from advertising models, and you have the skills and experience to contribute, we’d love to meet you.

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