Director of Self Serve
Company: Paddle
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What do we do?
Paddle offers digital product companies a completely different approach to their payment infrastructure. Instead of assembling and maintaining a complex stack of payments-related apps and services, we’re a Merchant of Record for our customers. That means we take away 100% of the pain of payment fragmentation. It’s faster, safer, cheaper, and, above all, way better.
We’re backed by investors including KKR, FTV Capital, Kindred, Notion, and 83North and serve over 10, 000 software sellers in 245 territories globally.
The Role
Self-serve today represents a meaningful part of Paddle's revenue. This role owns the commercial mandate to grow that significantly. Not just to run self-serve, but to build the strategy for where and how it scales, and execute against it.
We're hiring a Director of Self-Serve to take full commercial ownership of Paddle's self-serve motion, running and scaling it as a business line. Self-serve is a material and fast-moving part of our revenue, and it needs an owner who thinks in unit economics, not just funnel metrics.
You'll set the strategic direction, and work across Finance, Product, Engineering, Demand Generation, Partnerships, and RevOps to align everyone behind it. Getting this right is a genuinely cross-functional endeavour, and your ability to bring people with you will be just as important as your commercial acumen.
You'll operate with a small, focused team including engineering capacity. This is a role for someone who wants to build and run the engine hands on, not manage through layers.
What you'll do
Own the line. Carry the commercial number for self-serve end to end, from acquisition through adoption, to revenue and net retention. Own the unit economics, and how they improve.
Set the strategy. Form a clear commercial view of where self-serve creates value, ensure Finance and Product alignment, and translate it into a plan the business can execute against.
Own activation and time-to-value. Evolve who and how we through self-serve, how we nurture them through lifecycle stages, and the in-product experience that gets them to value fast. Increasing volume while decreasing time-to-value, not trading for the other. You fundamentally approach the self-serve experience as a product, running structured discovery and experimentation, not defaulting to marketing levers.
Shape the demand. Define the customer profile that makes the economics work and work collaboratively with Demand Generation on the targeting you need, co-owning a single funnel against a shared ICP.
Orchestrate cross-functionally. Codify the work into clear streams with clear owners, influence the Product, Engineering, and Risk roadmaps, and run a regular business cadence that keeps people aligned on priorities and impact.
Deepen partner integrations. Work hand-in-glove with Partnerships to turn distribution relationships into deep well-integrated channels, owning the commercial outcome of partner-sourced volume.
Build and run the engine. Design and run the experimentation, tooling, and tracking to improve funnel codification, time-to-value, activation, and conversion using AI where it raises velocity and quality, applied to the right customer. As the motion scales, you'll shape the team around it.
Make the economics stack up. Working closely with finance you own self-serve pricing and packaging as a lever, to ensure profitable scale.
How you operate
Go get the answer yourself. When something doesn't add up, you pull the data, run the analysis, and don't wait to be handed a conclusion. Self-reliance is core to how you operate, not a fallback when support isn't available.
You interrogate, not just observe. Live the ‘five whys’ principle, with the ability to take a plausible looking number, trend, signal and stress-test it until you've found the actual driver, not the first explanation that fits. You default to hypothesis and experiment before you default to opinion or output, treating the funnel as something to be iteratively shaped, not just optimised within.
Given a mission, you don't let go of it. You have a real hunger to find and unlock value you believe is there, working through blockers, organisational, technical, or data.
We'd love to hear from you if you are
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Deeply experienced in a PLG or self-serve motion in a high-growth tech business, where you've built and owned the funnel rather than a sales-assisted or enterprise motion, and have been accountable for the number, not adjacent to it.
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A commercial operator who has owned a revenue line, channel, or segment. Someone who operates in founder mode with the instinct to understand the economics, not just the funnel beneath them.
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You think like a product manager: prioritizing ruthlessly, scope experiments tightly, and see the boundary between growth and product as something to work across.
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Fluent at moving from data to a commercial conclusion, with the discipline to separate signal from noise and turn analysis into a clear decision rather than a list of observations.
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A sharp critical thinker who interrogates the brief rather than taking it at face value, challenges assumptions (including ours), and is as willing to conclude "this isn't where we should be investing" as to confirm the plan.
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A genuine cross-functional leader who has brought structure to messy, multi-team programmes, influenced roadmaps you don't control, and run the cadence that holds a programme together.
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A credible presence in front of senior stakeholders up to executive level; you communicate with clarity and authority and can take a room with competing priorities to a clear decision.
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Equally comfortable operating at altitude and dropping into the detail, and always coming back up with a point of view, not just findings.
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Able to use AI pragmatically; dynamic, predictive scoring, real-time segmentation, as a means to commercial outcomes, not an end in itself.
Everyone is welcome at Paddle
At Paddle, we're committed to removing invisible barriers, both for our customers and within our own teams. We recognise and celebrate that every Paddler is unique and we welcome every individual perspective. As an inclusive employer, we don't care if, or where, you studied, what you look like or where you're from. We're more interested in your craft, curiosity, passion for learning and what you'll add to our culture. We encourage you to apply even if you don't match every part of the job ad, especially if you're part of an underrepresented group.
Please let us know if there's anything we can do to better support you through the application process and in the workplace. We will do everything we can to support any accommodations needed. We're committed to building a diverse team where everyone feels safe to be their authentic self. Let's grow together.
Why you'll love working at Paddle
We're a diverse, growing group of Paddlers who pride ourselves on our transparent, collaborative and respectful culture.
We live and breathe our values, which are:
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Paddle for others
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Paddle together
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Paddle simply
We offer a full suite of benefits, including attractive salaries, stock options, unlimited holidays, enhanced parental leave, retirement plans, private healthcare and well-being initiatives.
We invest in learning and will help you with your personal development via constant exposure to new challenges, an annual learning fund, and regular internal and external training.
Connecting at Paddle
We're a 'digital-first' company, which means our Paddlers always have the freedom to choose where, when and how they work within our hub locations.
We recognise that where our Paddlers do their best work is unique to them and we provide trust and autonomy for everyone to work in a way which fits them best. We also value the power of connection and have invested in global hubs which help local communities flourish and bring us together for focused collaboration.
Our Paddle hubs:
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In Europe: UK (London headquarters), Lisbon, Amsterdam and Dublin
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In North America: Toronto (Canada)
Our hub philosophy creates an engaging experience for all Paddlers, wherever, whenever and however we choose to work. To support this, we focus hiring within our hubs and will always openly share the available locations for each open position on our job description.
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