Director, Performance Marketing

Kong•San Francisco, CA

1d•$171,430 - $275,000

About The Position

Kong is looking for a Director, Performance Marketing to lead and scale our global performance marketing engine. This role will own Performance Marketing strategy, budget, investment allocation, forecasting, and paid acquisition outcomes across channels, audiences, and regions. You'll be accountable for translating investment into qualified demand, pipeline, and measurable return, continuously determining where to scale, optimize, reallocate, or pull back investment. This is a hands-on leadership role. We're looking for someone who can set strategy and own the numbers while staying close to the channels, data, and execution. You'll lead agency partners, work closely across Marketing, Sales, Finance, and RevOps, and regularly translate performance into clear recommendations for senior leadership.

Requirements

10+ years of experience across Performance Marketing, Growth Marketing, Paid Media, Demand Generation, or related B2B SaaS disciplines, including experience leading 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 the ability to connect investment decisions to qualified demand, pipeline, revenue, and ROI—not just platform metrics
A 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
A strong operator mentality with the ability to move fluidly between strategy, financial management, analysis, team leadership, and execution

Nice To Haves

Experience in developer, infrastructure, API, cloud, or technical B2B SaaS strongly preferred

Responsibilities

Own Performance Marketing targets and strategy: Build and execute the global roadmap required to deliver paid acquisition, qualified demand, pipeline, efficiency, and ROAS goals.
Own the Performance Marketing budget: Lead budget planning, forecasting, pacing, and allocation across channels, audiences, regions, and GTM priorities. Continuously make disciplined decisions to scale, optimize, reallocate, or pull back investment based on business impact.
Lead Paid Search & Paid Social: Set channel strategy and ensure best-in-class execution, experimentation, optimization, and measurement across our core paid acquisition channels.
Turn data into investment decisions: Connect spend and channel performance to Responses/INQs → Qualified Demand → Pipeline → ROAS and use those signals to determine where the next dollar should go.
Build a high-velocity experimentation engine: Drive testing across audiences, creative, offers, bidding, channels, conversion paths, and emerging acquisition opportunities.
Leverage AI to scale performance: Use AI and automation to accelerate analysis, campaign optimization, creative testing, audience development, experimentation, and operational efficiency.
Build internal performance capability: Lead and develop channel specialists while establishing clear operating rhythms, standards, and accountability across the function.
Lead agency strategy: Own agency relationships and determine where external partners provide differentiated expertise, specialized capabilities, or incremental execution capacity.
Communicate performance to leadership: Deliver clear, concise performance narratives and investment recommendations to Marketing and company leadership, translating complex channel and funnel data into business implications, risks, opportunities, and actions.
Lead cross-functionally: Partner across Global Campaigns, Digital Experience, Product Marketing, RevOps, Finance, Sales, and regional teams to align priorities and translate GTM objectives into effective investment and execution.