Putting together a job description for a Growth Engineer? Wondering what others are doing? Save time with this cheat sheet! The below tidbits are taken from 30+ job descriptions for Growth Engineers, all from tech companies such as Asana, Airbnb, AdRoll, Cybercoders, Mircosoft, UXPin, and Zenefits, to name a few. Copy and paste what’s relevant to you to build your job description, or just scroll through to get some inspiration.

What do all these job descriptions tell us about growth engineering?

Some quick and dirty word frequency analysis reveals that frequently mentioned 2-word phrases are “a/b testing”, “social media”, and “user acquisition”. A look at 3-word phrases reveals that hiring managers are looking for people with computer science backgrounds that have a mix of analytical, marketing, and mobile skills.

What’s clear is that a growth engineer’s personality and attitude toward growth – be it company, team, or personal growth – matters just as much, if not more than, technical experience. None of the job descriptions mentioned requiring more than 3+ years of engineering experience, while almost every one mentioned the softer skills such as curiosity, acceptance of failure, and a passion for work.

What are the best job description lines?

I used my favorite lines from the job descriptions to create a rough sketch of a growth engineer. What does your ideal growth engineer look like?

Growth Engineer Job Description Cheat Sheet

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Job Requirements – Personality
Job Requirements – Values & Attitude
Job Requirements – Education
Job Requirements – General Experience
Job Requirements – Tech Experience
Job Requirements – Marketing Experience
Job Requirements – Analytics & Experimentation Experience
Job Requirements – Tech Language Specific Skills
Job Responsibilities – Build
Job Responsibilities – Grow & Optimize
Job Responsibilities – Analyze & Experiment
Job Responsibilities – Culture & Other
Job Perks
Sylvia’s Favorites

JOB REQUIREMENTS – PERSONALITY

heading 1	heading 2	heading 3	heading 4
Empathetic with customers	Innovative	Adaptable	Mindful
Scrappy	Excited to move quickly	Creative	Self motivated
Team player	Engineer first	Humble	Mature
Responsive	Dependable	Visionary	Friendly
Curious	Confident	Articulate	Resourceful
Collaborative	Respectful	Data-driven	Multitasker
Versatile	Love winning	Lack ego	Eager to learn
Analytical	Obsessive over results	Technologically agnostic	Internet addict

JOB REQUIREMENTS – VALUES, ATTITUDES

heading 1	heading 2	heading 3	heading 4
Passionate for clearing roadblocks	In the habit of questioning assumptions	Continuous learner who sees a failure as opportunity	Keen sense of the user
Desire to make a significant impact	Want to automate everything	Understand the human being on the other end of your code	Happy to move quickly
Have strong opinions	Accept failure as part of learning	Understand that when you and your team win, the company and customers also win	Keen appreciation for art, design, and user experience
Deep interest in working for and learning about consumer internet companies	You’ll put your heart and soul into projects that flop, but you’ll tackle the next iteration with as much gusto and passion as you did the first time	Always connecting your work back to business goals	Always meet deadlines
An executor with sense of urgency	Excited about work	Question and debate everything without taking things personally	Strong interest in learning about users behavior
Creativity in problem solving	Critical thinking about the current status quo	Strong desire to help solve our users’ problems	Willingness to learn what you don’t already know
Love a good corporate partnership	Passion for technology and design	Intrinsic drive to be successful	A fearless mindset when tackling challenges
Comfort and delight in a small, intense, high-growth startup environment	Passion for finding repeatable and scalable ways to increase growth	Incessant need to understand customer behaviour	Think perfect is the enemy of good enough
A strong product sense and mental model of how users behave	Enjoy variety and working on new and massive codebases alike	Live and breathe technology	Hunger to make products grow

JOB REQUIREMENTS – EDUCATION

Bachelor’s degree in engineering, science, math or business-related field
BA / BS required. Marketing or related field a plus
You have a Bachelor’s or better in a STEM field
Computer Science degree preferred but not required
At least a Bachelor degree in software engineering
BS or MS in Computer Science or relevant experience
Computer science (or related) degree, coding bootcamp completion, or extensive experience building web/mobile apps
Background in statistics

JOB REQUIREMENTS – GENERAL EXPERIENCE

Start-up experience
Experience managing personal relationships with vendors or clients
Experience with successfully gaining consumer engagement
Experience with Growth Hacking including retention
Solid Growth Framework knowledge
Proven ability to scale a start-up from the ground up
Relevant experience in working for (or with) a fast-growth consumer start-up from conception through commercial launch
You can spec lower-level development work
Excellent communication skills in English
A general idea of what a company should be doing in the early stages
A proven track record of working with a remote team
Experience building and maintaining products with real-world usage
You have side projects outside of work
Experience trying to drive usage for something you’ve built in the past
Ability to multi-task, prioritize, and manage time effectively
Ability to work in a fast paced, team environment
Saas experience is a major plus
At least 1 year experience in growth hacking tactics
Background in UX
Know when to build vs buy
Experience scaling and improving performance on evolving software and web applications
Previous experience scaling a social media account to impressive numbers
Previous experience in a Saas company or role in product (for the sideprojects we work on)
Experience working with small teams with Agile methodologies
Experience as startup founder
Experience being part of large growth team
Ability to write compelling, accurate and grammatically correct content at a prompt pace
A balance of writing skills, creativity and analytical skills
Strong problem solving skills
Strong technical, analytical, and product background

JOB REQUIREMENTS – TECH EXPERIENCE

Prior experience with building architectural patterns for large, high-scale web applications
Building web applications in a corporate or startup environment
Exceptional proficiency in software engineering
Integration skills
3+ years of experience in product management, user acquisition marketing or similar fields
2+ years experience building world class, public facing web applications
3+ years of mobile-specific experience (including both iOS and Android)
Track record of delivering massive growth to user base
Strong writing and communication skills
Deep understanding SEO/SEM, social and viral mechanics
Great full stack programming skills
Solid knowledge of current web technologies
Are experienced in driving email growth
Able to create landing pages and email messages
Understanding of cross-browser incompatibilities and HTML best practices
Pair-Programming, Agile Methodologies
Devoted to writing excellent, clean, and readable code

JOB REQUIREMENTS – MARKETING EXPERIENCE

Working knowledge of ad serving tools
Great knowledge of different social media platforms
Experience in any of the following: Email marketing, content marketing, PR, affiliates, partnerships, sales, SEO
Good with paid social e.g. Facebook/Twitter ads, Adwords
Have experience with ambassador/loyalty programs
Minimum 5 years digital marketing experience

JOB REQUIREMENTS – ANALYTICS & EXPERIMENTATION EXPERIENCE

Analytical mind applying scientific rigour through A/B Testing and Build/Measure/Learn cycles
Intuitive understanding of how to manipulate, analyze and interpret highly complex data
You love implementing new flows and setup A/B tests
Experience with data pipelines, warehousing and reporting systems
Expertise in analyzing large datasets
Solid analytical and statistical skills, and an understanding of A/B or multi-variant testing
Database knowledge
Experience with analytics technologies
Deep knowledge of A/B Testing and Build/Measure/Learn cycles
Ability to prioritize data-driven decisions and courses of action
Experience with new and current user acquisition
Analytics, integration, and optimization
Understand the difference between data, metrics, and KPIs
Solid knowledge of website analytics tools (e.g., Google Analytics, Clicky)
Experience analyzing data and arriving at actionable recommendations

JOB REQUIREMENTS – TECH LANGUAGE SPECIFIC SKILLS

3+ years server-side web frameworks and languages (preferably Python)
Good at JavaScript and PHP
Strong with front-end technologies (HTML, CSS)
Fluent in both frontend and backend code
Have used a MVC web framework, especially Django
Knows Python and Scrapy like the back of your hand
Open source software and StackOverflow contributions
Working knowledge of HTML5/CSS and SQL
Familiar with Git, Ruby, RabbitMQ, Redis, MongoDB as a plus
Experience in developing web applications in PHP
You know your way around Photoshop and Sketch
Programming languages like HTML/CSS/jQuery don’t have any secret to you and you can work with basic PHP
Experience interfacing with Web Services platforms and concepts, RESTful APIs, SOAP, and XML/JSON
Experience coding clean and well documented object oriented Javascript
Experience with Backbone, React, and JQuery
Experience with Ruby on Rails or other MVC Frameworks
Fluent in 2+ programming languages and willing to learn more
Knowledge of HTML, HTTP, REST, and Web Frameworks
Fluent in Ruby, RoR and Sinatra
Experience building large-scale ad tools
Exposure to architectural patterns of a large, high-scale web application
Work across the stack: mostly Python/Flask, PostgreSQL, JavaScript (React/JQuery/Backbone) and working with AWS

JOB REQUIREMENTS – BUILD

Unify our analytics infrastructure across disparate software and human processes
Launch, measure and optimize a referral program for employees, customers, and channel partners
Apply performance engineering to cut down on the product’s load times
Enable new users to adopt xyz product without speaking to another human being by revamping the registration flow
Ship weekly if not daily
Find that perfect balance between high quality code and getting a project shipped
Work across the codebase on features that unblock whole classes of users, like supporting new platforms or languages
Build a user-centric communication platform
Internationalise our product so that it continues to adapt and work for our global audience
Drive automated and algorithmic approaches to biddable media across retargeting, display, SEM and Social advertising channels
Create innovative technology that delights our users so that they are willing to share their positive experience with their friends, colleagues and acquaintances
Build features on the bleeding edge of our mobile and web products
Maintain infrastructure/systems needed for optimizing both user growth and retention
Build front-end campaigns that bend the internet to our will
Build internal tools and infrastructure for our data and testing
Create and optimize advertising and remarketing campaigns
Develop pixel-perfect landing pages or widgets for our growth experiments
Scrape, cross-reference, and mine datasets to produce lists of outbound leads
Set up and optimize landing pages, media buying, and email automations
Come up with and expedite growth hacks to generate inbound and outbound leads
Work closely with the CEO to realize vision for data infrastructure and business intelligence tools and hit subscription goals
Improve and build new funky stuff on our websites
Ensure internal developer experience is best in class
Improve internal tooling to increase productivity across the team

JOB RESPONSIBILITIES – GROW & OPTIMIZE

Amplify natural behaviors such as sharing and word of mouth between users
Drive more engagement with the site by sending relevant, personalized emails – this involves determining what users will find engaging, and how to best deliver it
Help visitors discover and share our product through social platforms
Optimize the site for first-touch visitors, especially in early growth markets
Onboard and optimize new channels
Find ways to hack channels to acquire traffic and users in ways no one has thought of before
Think outside the box to identify new ways to reach and activate users in our target audience
Improve areas that especially impact new users, like account setup and invitation flow
Meet performance goals through user acquisition, improving conversion rate and reducing churn rate
Work with a cross-skill team on complex business problems to drive growth
Work directly with the product and engineering teams to guide decisions and instrumentation in the right direction for growth
Decide critical pieces of the next big social media, pushing its scale to the millions
Define the processes of our emerging growth team
Use tools and techniques such as SEO and social media optimization to rapidly grow our audience
Think from a customer’s perspective on how we can remove product and/or process roadblocks
Think deeply about how our customers find and get traction with our products, and how to remove their roadblocks
Apply a proven advertising playbook to new markets and marketing channels in hopes of growing them quickly
Weigh in on advertising creative based on test data, cultural attitudes, and national regulations
Utilize growth frameworks to drive customer acquisition
Own the overall marketing strategy
Lead the development, execution and optimization of our digital acquisition efforts
Propose creative new approaches to capturing existing demand
Create ways to reach a broader target audience more effectively
As a Growth Engineer, you would be given goals such as “increase the unique views for our jobs by 10%” and free rein to find ways to achieve it
Improve our ability to measure marketing performance
Improve site health
Optimize existing user acquisition methods as well as constantly explore new growth channels

JOB RESPONSIBILITIES – ANALYZE & EXPERIMENT

Select and set up analytics tools so we’re able to collect data and make sense of it
Perform deep analysis of marketing spend across various channels (display, search, TV, radio, print, etc.) to learn and identify the most effective strategies
Measure the reach and usage patterns of our application
Make decisions based on data and A/B testing new features and ideas
Generate ideas for analysis to shape future projects
Analyze app data to continuously refine and improve mobile marketing strategies
Develop an in-depth understanding of user segments and target audience: their needs and key drivers throughout customer lifecycle
Conduct A/B tests with different features and designs across multiple different platforms
Develop dashboards and reports to regularly communicate results
Visualize data patterns
Design and implement growth experiments, from generating ideas to analysis of experiment results
Perform basic and sophisticated analyses to generate product and growth insights
Experiment with freemium tools and viral loops
Running back-to-back A/B tests on every part of our business
Closely monitor core metrics as well as uncover insights not yet appreciated
Assist product and marketing teams to interpret results and present them to management without bias to drive business decisions
Produce actionable data so we’re able to know what works and monitor progress
Work with Product and Platform to set up dashboards, A/B tests, and experiments
Design, implement and evaluate A/B tests
Approximate the effect of behavior that can’t be interpreted from logging, or even experimentally
Develop a hypothesis about what prevents some users from inviting other users, help design an experiment to test that hypothesis, then analyze the results
Answer questions like “does usage of a certain feature drive product usage?” and “is this experiment a success?”
Model the state of our relationship with each of our monthly visitors
Apply deep behavioural learning to create highly targeted engagement

JOB RESPONSIBILITIES – CULTURE & OTHER

Mentor and learn
Grow a collaborative, optimistic, and supportive culture
Keep current with new developments in design field and inbound marketing
Stay up-to-date with the latest changes and trends in digital marketing and UI/UX
Share your learnings
Wear many hats
Be a key decision maker and work very closely with leadership
Build relationships with agencies, publishers, and networks
Be an evangelist for growth engineering and instill a strong growth mindset internally and externally
Participate in creative planning sessions to help define and evaluate growth initiatives
Work to solve a defined problem however you feel appropriate
Work across both engineering and non-engineering teams to get things done
Become fully immersed in synchronous communications, becoming an expert in both UX and engineering implementations
Consult with clients on user acquisition/growth hacking strategies
Help refine the Growth Team process—what should we focus on? How much risk do we want? What’s the tradeoff of knowledge versus sure(r) wins?

JOB PERKS

Work from anywhere you like
Work with smart, fun and diverse people in a fast growing company
Getting in on the ground floor of a promising startup
Ultimate career destination
Exciting job opportunities
We believe that you can and should love your job–and be successful at it–and we provide the tools to make that happen
You’d take part of an insane growth trajectory
Competitive salaries and benefits
Environment that emphasizes the importance of smart and sound engineering
We have latitude in terms of what problems we solve, what tools we use and how we solve them
All of the team has startup experience, being early employees, going thru accelerators like Y Combinator and everyone has either a Computer Science or Engineering degree (even the product guy)
Our opportunity is as big as the number of all workers that have now, or will have access to a smartphone. Go ahead… take a moment and let that sink in
Over 20 million people currently use our applications and we are growing out that user base at a rapid pace
We are now the fastest growing community since Instagram and Pinterest!

SYLVIA’S FAVORITES

My favorite lines from all the job descriptions are below. What’s yours?

Growth Engineer

Sylvia Ng