Director of Retention

About Sequencing
Sequencing is the world’s largest direct-to-consumer whole genome sequencing platform, helping define the future of AI-powered personalized health.

We’re a Series A venture-backed, fully remote company turning clinical-grade whole genome sequencing into meaningful, personalized insights. Through AI and a growing ecosystem of genomic applications, we’re building the trusted home for every genome.

In 2026, GenomeWeb named Sequencing a Best Places to Work winner, highlighting our fully remote culture of autonomy, transparency, and growth. As our COO, Shara Birn, put it: “We hire talented people, give them meaningful responsibility, and trust them to make decisions.”

About the Role

Subscription retention is the biggest lever on Sequencing's growth, and this is the first role dedicated to it. As Director of Retention you own the retention number: subscription retention, renewal and recurring revenue. You set the strategy, run the work that delivers it, and are the single accountable owner for it across product, engineering, growth, customer support, bioinformatics and finance.

This is a hands-on operating role at a fast-moving company. You are the core owner of retention across the company. You will pull the cohort, payment and cancel data yourself, find the causes, fix the fast ones directly (payment recovery, dunning, the cancellation flow, offers, lifecycle triggers), spec and ship the slower ones with engineering and design, and measure every change against a holdout. AI is how you work, not a tool you occasionally reach for: you build your own analyses, agents and automations with it, and you are expected to raise the bar for how the whole company uses it.

You sit on the product team and report to the CEO until the Head of Product & Customer Experience is hired, then to that role. The Head of Product & Customer Experience will own the end-to-end customer journey. You have a defined engineering allocation for retention work and direct control of billing and subscription tooling (Stripe) and of account and billing messaging in the lifecycle platform. Your closest partner is lifecycle marketing on the growth team. You think about retention constantly: why members stay, why they leave, and what we change to keep them.

What You'll Do

• Set the retention strategy: the targets for subscription retention, renewal and recurring revenue, and a plan that separates levers that pay back in 90 days from ones that compound over 12 months.

• Own the retention metrics: cohort retention, trial-to-paid conversion, voluntary and involuntary churn, MRR and LTV, reported monthly to leadership with a holdout-based read and a financial case behind each initiative.

• Find out why members leave, from cohort and payment data in the warehouse and Stripe to cancel reasons, support tickets and interviews, and turn it into fixes that start from the member’s problem.

• Own the retention product roadmap across web, coaching and our new AI-native app: the fixes and features that keep members subscribed, from trial-to-paid and onboarding through results delivery, subscription management, payment recovery, renewal and upgrade, to the cancellation and win-back flows.

• Optimize the subscription offering: what each plan includes and how it's structured and priced, working with finance on renewal economics and with growth on offers and promotions.

• Run delivery end to end: write the specs, prioritize with engineering and design, run the experiments, and see each release through launch and measurement.

• Drive cross-functional alignment: bring engineering, growth, customer support, data and finance together on shared retention goals, and give lifecycle marketing the goals, segments and triggers its programs run against.

Success in Your First 90 Days

• You’ve built your own picture of why members leave, straight from the data, with a dollar value on each cause.

• You’ve shipped your first changes yourself, and measured what they did against members who didn’t get them.

• You’ve set what comes next: a 12-month plan, agreed with leadership and finance, with the revenue each piece is worth.

What You Bring

• 8+ years in direct-to-consumer subscription businesses, in product or growth, with direct ownership of a retention, renewal or recurring-revenue number, not just the features behind it.

• A track record of measurably moving retention, churn or lifetime value, with the numbers, the method and the holdout to show it.

• Strong product fundamentals: clear specs, a roadmap prioritized against business impact, delivery run with engineering and design through launch, and experiments you design, read and act on.

• Fluency in subscription economics (cohorts, churn, LTV, payback, pricing and packaging) and the SQL to see it yourself: you build your own cohort, survival and payment-failure views from the warehouse and Stripe. Analysts are a bonus, not a dependency.

• The retention toolkit, hands-on: dunning and retries, card updater, cancellation and win-back flows, pause and downgrade paths, trial design, and lifecycle triggers across email, push and in-app, and how to sequence them for payback.

• Cross-functional leadership: you set the strategy, secure the engineering and design time it needs, hold teams to shared goals, and communicate clearly and concisely with executives.

• An AI true believer, not a casual user: you already run your own analyses, agents and automations with AI, have built something real with it, and can show us in the interview.

Nice to Have

• Startup experience, especially building a retention function from scratch.

• Experience with a trial-to-paid model where the trial starts before the core value is delivered, such as a lab or hardware product with a processing wait.

• Healthtech, consumer wellness, genomics or another regulated consumer category.

• A business that pairs a physical product with a digital subscription, such as a kit plus an app or reports.

• Pricing and packaging work: plan design, trials, bundles, and upgrade and downgrade paths.

• Experience with Stripe, Snowflake, Amplitude or Heap, and lifecycle platforms such as Blueshift, Braze, Iterable or Klaviyo.

• Mobile app engagement and retention.

Why Sequencing?

For decades, the human genome has been one of the richest health information in the world, but most people have never been able to truly understand or use it. We’re changing that.

We're transforming billions of genetic variants and decades of scientific research into technology people can interact with naturally and trust. This isn't another health app. It's a new category that brings together bioinformatics, genetics, and consumer health.

Your work won’t just help build Sequencing. It will help redefine how people understand themselves through their DNA for decades to come.

Our values spell out the four DNA bases: Advocate, Commit, Guide, Trust.

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage

• 401(k) with company match

• Paid time off

• Paid volunteer time off annual, during normal business hours

• Fully remote work, with equipment provided and internet and cell reimbursements

• Parental bonding leave

• Private, confidential clinical-grade whole genome sequencing for you and your immediate family

Join us in helping build the interface between humanity and its DNA!