Amazon PPC/DSP Specialist

Rockstar is recruiting for a marketplace management firm that handles e-commerce operations for brands across major retail channels. They specialize in catalog management, content, retail operations, and advertising on platforms like Amazon, Walmart, and Target Plus. Their AI Agentic Commerce practice builds proprietary tooling for optimized performance.

About the Company

The company manages the marketplace business for brands that can't afford to get it wrong. They handle catalog, content, retail operations, and advertising across Amazon (Seller Central and Vendor Central), Walmart Marketplace, Target Plus, and other emerging channels, and they run an AI Agentic Commerce practice building their own tooling for this work.

Their clients span consumer packaged goods, cosmetics, skincare, apparel, footwear, and handbags. They hire them to operate their channel, not to advise from a distance.

The Role

Advertising Analysts run the accounts. This is the seat where the work actually happens.

Analysts own the day-to-day management of advertising for a set of client brands across Amazon, Walmart Marketplace, and Target Plus — building campaigns, managing bids and budgets, adjusting targeting, watching pacing, and finding the changes that move performance. Their manager sets the strategy and the media plan; they make it real in the platform, and they are the first person to know when something isn't working.

This is an individual contributor role, but it isn't a heads-down one. Analysts work directly with the Strategy & Implementation Team on retail readiness — inventory, catalog, promotions, detail page quality — and with the Design Team on creative for Sponsored Brands, video, and display. Advertising in these channels doesn't perform in isolation, and analysts who understand that make better recommendations than analysts who only look at ad reports.

Analysts also do a meaningful amount of thinking, not just executing. They run account audits, dig into search term and placement data to find waste and opportunity, build the analysis behind quarterly and annual business reviews, and prepare the decks their manager presents to client leadership. Where they see a better answer than the plan calls for, the company wants to hear it.

The company expects analysts to use AI in their work. The team uses AI for report analysis, bulk file preparation, keyword and search term work, audit drafting, and internal tooling. They don't need to be an engineer, but they should be comfortable working with AI tools and interested in using them to get through the mechanical parts of the job faster so they can spend more time on the parts that require judgment.

This role is a path to account and strategy ownership. The analysts who do it well are the people the company promotes.

What You'll Own

• Campaign management and optimization: Build, launch, and manage Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Brands Video, Sponsored Display, and Amazon DSP campaigns, plus their Walmart Connect and Target Roundel equivalents. Manage bids, budgets, negatives, placement modifiers, and dayparting against agreed targets. Keep pacing on plan and flag risk before it becomes a shortfall.
• Keyword, targeting, and audience work: Research and build keyword and product targeting sets, mine search term reports for new opportunity and wasted spend, and maintain clean negative structures. Support audience building and testing in DSP.
• Analysis: Pull and interrogate the data yourself — search term, placement, product-level, and business reports — and turn it into a recommendation rather than a summary. Understand why a number moved, not just that it did.
• Account audits: Perform structured audits on new and existing accounts: campaign architecture, targeting overlap, budget allocation, wasted spend, missed placements, and gaps between what the account is doing and what the strategy calls for. Write up findings clearly enough that someone else can act on them.
• Client reporting and business reviews: Build the reporting that keeps clients informed, and prepare the analysis and decks for quarterly and annual business reviews. Your work goes in front of client leadership, so it needs to be accurate, clear, and defensible.
• AI-assisted workflows: Use AI tools to speed up analysis, bulk file work, keyword processing, and documentation. Contribute to improving how the team works rather than just following the process you were handed.
• Collaboration: Partner with the Strategy & Implementation Team on retail readiness and the Design Team on creative. Raise the constraints — inventory, catalog, pricing, page quality — that advertising can't fix on its own.
  

What You Bring

Required

• 2+ years hands-on experience building, managing, and optimizing Amazon advertising campaigns
• Amazon Ads certification in Sponsored Ads and Amazon DSP (both required; verified)
• Experience with Amazon DSP campaign management, not just Sponsored Ads
• Genuinely analytical: comfortable in large data sets, can build your own analysis in Excel or Sheets, and check your own math
• Intellectual curiosity: want to know why something happened, and keep pulling the thread after the immediate question is answered
• Strong written and verbal communication: can explain a performance change in plain language and write findings a client can read
• Proficiency working with AI tools and AI-assisted workflows
• Detail discipline: bulk uploads, naming conventions, and negatives done right the first time
  

Preferred

• Walmart Sponsored Ads and Walmart DSP certification
• Meta and TikTok ads experience, with certifications
• Target Roundel experience
• SQL, Looker Studio / Google Data Studio, or Amazon Marketing Cloud exposure
• Agency or multi-brand experience across categories
• Advanced Excel; Python or scripting a plus
• Familiarity with retail fundamentals: Buy Box, inventory health, catalog integrity, promotions, subscriptions
  

Who Does Well Here

The work is cyclical and the peaks are demanding — Q4 and Prime Day compress a quarter of decisions into a few weeks. The analysts who do well here treat a bad week as something to diagnose rather than defend, and would rather find the problem themselves than be told about it.

The company also looks for ownership (escalate early and don't lose things), intellectual honesty (would rather be corrected than confidently wrong), care about accuracy, and a habit of fixing a manual process the third time you run it.

What Success Looks Like

• 30 days: Managing daily optimizations on your accounts with light supervision, and you know each brand's structure, targets, and constraints.
• 90 days: Running your accounts independently, delivering audits and reporting your manager doesn't have to rewrite, and surfacing recommendations rather than waiting for direction.
• 12 months: Your accounts show measurable improvement you can explain, you're trusted in front of clients, and you've improved at least one thing about how the team works.
  

How to Stand Out

Come ready to walk through one account you improved — what you found, what you changed, and how you knew it worked.