Senior Lifecycle & Retention Manager

Pete Tong DJ Academy (MAT Academy in Italy) is an online school for DJs and electronic music producers, with members in 150 countries. Our courses are taught by artists such as Pete Tong, Carl Cox, Jamie Jones, Adam Beyer and Diplo, inside a digital campus with community, live sessions, a grading path and real career outlets: our Talent Pool, theFuture Talent Awards and our DISCOVR label.

We moved to a subscription model in 2025, closed a funding round in 2026, and are now scaling. Our HQ is in Rome.

The role

You own the member lifecycle from first login onward, and your first priority is the start:turning a new member into someone who studies every week, beginning with a firstlesson in their very first days. From there, you grow the value of each membership, movingmembers to annual and higher plans at the right moment and keeping those we are aboutto lose. And you bring order to how we talk to members, so every message lands at theright time and nobody hears from us too often. You report directly to our Chief Product &Technology Officer.

This is a senior seat in a new team. You will set up how lifecycle works here, run it hands-on, and grow the team around it: lifecycle is a fairly new function here and we plan toexpand it. In the early phase, while our design capacity ramps up, you will also enjoygetting hands-on with the craft yourself: shaping email and in-app templates, offer pagesand small UI touches inside our tools. You are also the custodian of our CRM system: theautomations, segments, rules and calendar every team uses to talk to members.

What you'll own

Activation: the first 30 days of every member. Onboarding by persona, the first lessonin the first days, and the nudges that turn a signup into a study habit.

Upsell and expansion: moving members to annual plans and higher tiers at the rightmoment, with offers tied to their progress and to our big moments (contests, releases,events). When our sales team reaches out to existing members, you decide who theycall and what they offer.

Retention and win back: the cancellation flow, save offers, win-back campaigns, andfailed-payment recovery together with Administration.

The CRM system: automations, segments, frequency caps, priority rules and theshared member calendar. You run ActiveCampaign and set the rules other teamspublish within. You also put together the weekly campus newsletter from each team'scontributions.

Experiments: a steady test pipeline across onboarding, pricing moments andmessaging, read on revenue and retention, not just clicks.

Voice of the member: bringing cancellation reasons and lifecycle insight to themonthly product review, so product fixes the causes, not just the symptoms.

How you'll be measured

Share of new members completing a first lesson within 7 days.

Activation rate of each new cohort.

Share of members on annual plans, and upgrades to higher tiers.

Churn at renewal, and how many failed payments we win back.

Health of the channel: emails per member per week, unsubscribes and clicks bymessage type.

What we're looking for

Must have

4+ years in lifecycle, CRM or retention marketing, with at least 2 in a subscriptionbusiness (B2C SaaS, e-learning, media, apps).

A track record of moving activation, conversion to annual or churn, with numbers youcan walk us through.

Hands-on with a marketing automation platform: you build journeys, segments andtriggers yourself, not through an agency.

Strong analytical habits: cohorts, A/B tests, reading results on revenue rather thanopens.

Clear, warm writing in English, and the judgment to know when a message should notbe sent.

Comfort working across teams without formal authority: product, community, content,sales and finance.

Nice to have

Dunning and failed-payment recovery.

Persona-based onboarding or in-product messaging (push, in-app).

SQL, or comfort pulling your own data with AI tools.

Experience with international audiences and localized lifecycle.

A good eye for UI: email builders, basic HTML and CSS, or Figma.

A personal interest in DJing or music production.

Tools and how we work

Tools: ActiveCampaign for CRM and automations, Chargebee for billing, Circle forcampus and community, GTM and GA4 for tracking, and a data layer we are buildingaround one customer ID.

Rome office, hybrid.

Lifecycle sits next to product, community and engineering, andthe best ideas come from being in the same room.

Short loops:

you talk to members, read the data yourself, and ship tests every week.

One system, many voices:

each team writes its own messages; you own the rules, thecalendar and the automations that keep members from being over-messaged.

What we offer

Permanent contract, with a competitive package matched to seniority.

A senior seat with a direct line to the CPTO and the room to build and grow the team.

Full access to the Academy's courses and campus.

A product used by DJs and producers worldwide, built next to some of the biggestnames in electronic music.