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Kong, an AI Connectivity Company, is seeking a Director of Performance Marketing to lead and scale the global performance marketing function. This is a hands-on leadership role combining strategic oversight with direct involvement in execution.
You will own the complete performance marketing strategy, budget allocation, forecasting, and paid acquisition outcomes across all channels, audiences, and regions. Your core accountability is translating investment into qualified demand, pipeline, and measurable return on ad spend (ROAS), making disciplined decisions about where to scale, optimize, reallocate, or reduce investment based on business impact.
Key responsibilities include:
- Building and executing the global performance marketing roadmap to deliver paid acquisition, qualified demand, pipeline efficiency, and ROAS targets
- Leading budget planning, forecasting, pacing, and allocation across channels, audiences, regions, and go-to-market priorities
- Setting strategy and ensuring best-in-class execution across Paid Search and Paid Social channels
- Connecting spend and channel performance to qualified demand, pipeline, and revenue outcomes to inform investment decisions
- Building a high-velocity experimentation engine across audiences, creative, offers, bidding, channels, and conversion paths
- Leveraging AI and automation to accelerate analysis, campaign optimization, creative testing, and operational efficiency
- Leading and developing internal channel specialists while establishing clear operating rhythms and accountability
- Managing agency relationships and determining where external partners add differentiated value
- Delivering clear performance narratives and investment recommendations to marketing and company leadership
- Partnering cross-functionally with Global Campaigns, Digital Experience, Product Marketing, RevOps, Finance, Sales, and regional teams
Success metrics include paid-attributed qualified demand and pipeline, ROAS and return on investment, acquisition efficiency, performance against forecasts, effective spend allocation, experiment velocity, and building a trusted function that clearly communicates investment strategy and outcomes.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 10+ years of experience in Performance Marketing, Growth Marketing, Paid Media, Demand Generation, or related B2B SaaS disciplines, including leadership of a performance function
- Deep expertise across Paid Search and Paid Social with strong knowledge of modern B2B acquisition and measurement
- Demonstrated ownership of significant global media budgets including annual planning, forecasting, pacing, allocation, and in-quarter reallocation
- Strong financial and analytical orientation with ability to connect investment decisions to qualified demand, pipeline, revenue, and ROI (not just platform metrics)
- Track record of building rigorous experimentation and optimization programs and translating learnings into investment decisions
- Experience building and developing high-performing internal teams while effectively leveraging agencies and external partners
- Hands-on understanding of modern advertising platforms, analytics, attribution, automation, and AI-enabled performance tools
- Exceptional executive communication and storytelling skills with experience presenting performance, investment recommendations, risks, and business outcomes to senior leadership
- Demonstrated ability to influence cross-functional stakeholders, build alignment across teams with different priorities, and drive execution
- Strong operator mentality with ability to move fluidly between strategy, financial management, analysis, team leadership, and execution
- Experience in developer, infrastructure, API, cloud, or technical B2B SaaS strongly preferred
