Associate Director of Marketing

About American Heritage Lending

American Heritage Lending (AHL) is a non-QM mortgage lender headquartered in Irvine, CA. Our roots are in investment property financing — DSCR, fix-and-flip, ground-up construction, bridge, and small-balance multifamily — and we serve the broader non-QM market with a product suite built for borrowers and brokers who don't fit the agency box. We operate across both retail and TPO/wholesale channels.

We are in the middle of a deliberate transformation from a traditional non-QM lender into a fintech-enabled platform. Technology has become a hockey-stick growth area for us — it now touches nearly every function in the company, from how we price and underwrite loans, to how we train our team, to how we generate and qualify leads, to how brokers and borrowers experience us at every step. That investment is accelerating, not slowing, and it is the single biggest reason our trajectory looks different from the rest of the industry's.

Marketing sits at the center of that thesis. We are looking for senior marketing leaders to take AHL's marketing function from founder-led to fully built out — and to make the case to the market that AHL is not just another non-QM lender, but a company actively rewriting how non-QM gets originated.

What you will own

Demand generation and performance marketing

• Run performance marketing end-to-end across paid search, paid social, programmatic, YouTube/CTV, and emerging channels, with a clear weekly cadence on spend, CAC, and ROAS.

• Hit CAC and ROAS targets by product and channel across our full non-QM suite — investment property and beyond — managing the team, media buyers, and agency partners delivering against them.

• Build and optimize landing pages, lead forms, and digital tools (loan calculators, DSCR estimators, rehab budget tools, and what comes next) across ahlend.com (retail) and ahlendtpo.com (wholesale).

Content and brand

• Define and evolve AHL's brand positioning for distinct audiences: real estate investors and non-QM borrowers on the retail side, and mortgage brokers and TPO partners on the wholesale side.

• Run an always-on editorial engine: market-specific content for investors (cap rates, rents, vacancy, absorption), product education across the full non-QM product set, broker enablement, and thought-leadership for senior decision-makers.

• Own creative direction across digital, video, social, sales enablement, and event collateral. Maintain and evolve the AHL brand guidelines.

Lifecycle, CRM, and marketing operations

• Run HubSpot day-to-day: workflows, lists, lead scoring, routing, attribution, drip campaigns, and lifecycle automation.

• Build and maintain multi-touch attribution that ties marketing spend to funded loan volume — by source, campaign, LO, broker, and product.

• Own loyalty and referral programs end-to-end — enrollment, mechanics, comms, and reporting — for both retail borrowers and broker partners.

SEO and organic growth

• Drive organic traffic and qualified leads to AHL's product pages, calculators, and educational content across the full non-QM product set.

• Coordinate technical SEO, content SEO, and link acquisition. Own the analytics stack (GA4, Search Console, Google Ads) that ties organic effort to funded volume.

Partner and channel marketing

• Build and run co-marketing programs with real estate investor coaching partners, iBuyers, wholesalers, REI meetups, franchise networks, and the broader ecosystem that drives qualified borrowers to AHL.

• Support the TPO/wholesale channel with broker recruitment campaigns, content for AEs to deploy, event presence, and a steady drumbeat of product and rate communications across the full non-QM suite.

• Negotiate, structure, and operationalize partner agreements with the BD team — landing pages, tracking, attribution, and unit economics.

Product marketing in a fintech transformation

• Position AHL's accelerating technology investment as a structural competitive advantage. As new tools, data products, and platform capabilities ship — internally and to our customers — translate them into clear value props for brokers, borrowers, and partners.

• Make the case that the next decade of non-QM lending will be won by lenders who pair best-in-class capital and credit policy with superior technology — and that AHL is the proof point.

• Partner closely with Product and Engineering on launches, naming, positioning, and go-to-market for everything we ship to the outside world.

Analytics, planning, and operations

• Contribute marketing's section of the weekly business review. Report on funded volume by source, CAC, ROAS, broker activations, and campaign-level efficiency.

• Help build the annual marketing plan and budget; own the execution detail behind it.

• Manage the marketing tech stack: HubSpot, GA4, Google Ads, Meta Business, LinkedIn Campaign Manager, Power BI, Looker Studio, and the rest of the kit. Push it forward as our internal tech capability expands.

Team leadership and management

• Lead a team of marketers across one or more functional areas. Hire, develop, and manage direct reports; coach to outcomes; set the performance bar for your group; and contribute to the broader marketing org design alongside the Director.

• Develop the people on your team into the next generation of AHL marketing leaders.

• Manage agency relationships (paid media, creative, PR) and contractor talent (designers, copywriters, video editors). Hold partners to AHL's standards and replace them when they don't meet the bar.

• Partner with Sales, TPO, Operations, Capital Markets, and Technology as a true cross-functional peer.

What you will bring

Must-haves

• 6–9 years of marketing experience with a clear track record of owning programs end-to-end, delivering measurable results, and managing people (direct reports, not just contractors).

• Real management experience. You have hired, coached, given hard feedback, and held people accountable. You are ready to do more of it, with more scope.

• Proven performance marketing chops. You can talk about specific campaigns you ran, what you spent, what you got back, and what you learned — at the keyword, audience, and creative level.

• Fluency with the modern marketing stack: HubSpot (or a peer CRM), Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn, GA4, and at least one BI tool (Power BI, Looker Studio, Tableau).

• Comfort with data. You build your own dashboards, you read attribution critically, and you don't outsource the numbers.

• Strong writer and editor. You can produce a clean draft of an email, a landing page, or an ad without it needing to be rewritten.

• Bias to ship. You move fast, you instrument what you ship, and you iterate against real results.

Strong preference for

• Background in fintech, mortgage, real estate, or B2B/B2B2C financial services.

• Experience marketing across multiple product lines and dual audiences (e.g., direct-to-consumer and channel partners).

• Familiarity with non-QM, broker / wholesale channel marketing, or other parts of the mortgage value chain (TPO, IMB, correspondent).

• Comfort working in a regulated environment; you know what a compliance review is and you don't fear it.

• Real fluency with AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT, image and video generators) as production multipliers — and genuine interest in how AI reshapes marketing operations.

How we will know you are a fit

• You are excited about the front-row seat to a fintech transformation in an industry that has earned its reputation for moving slowly.

• You ask hard questions about the business model and unit economics, not just the creative brief.

• You are skeptical of vanity metrics and direct about what is and isn't working.

• You like the idea of an executive partner who is hands-on in marketing rather than abstract about it.

• You want to build, not maintain.

What we offer

• Senior leadership role with direct partnership to the Managing Director and a clear seat at the marketing leadership table.

• Competitive base salary and performance bonus tied to funded volume and marketing ROI. Clear path to Director-level scope and compensation as the function continues to scale.

• Comprehensive health, dental, vision, and 401(k).

• Remote arrangement available for the right candidate.

• A front-row seat to — and a material role in — the reinvention of non-QM lending. Capital, credit policy, technology, and brand are all on the table. The people who join this team now are the ones who will get to look back in five years and say they helped build it.