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If you don’t think you meet all of the criteria below but are still interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box - we’re looking for candidates that are particularly strong in a few areas, and have some interest and capabilities in others.
About the Role:
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.
What You'll Do:
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.
How We'll Measure Success:
You'll be accountable for the business performance and efficiency of Performance Marketing, including:
Paid-attributed qualified demand and pipeline
ROAS and return on investment
Acquisition efficiency
Performance against investment forecasts and budget
Effective allocation and reallocation of spend
Experiment velocity and incremental performance
Paid Search and Paid Social performance
Success also means building a trusted Performance Marketing function that can clearly communicate where we're investing, what's working, what isn't, and where the next dollar should go.
What You'll Bring:
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
Experience in developer, infrastructure, API, cloud, or technical B2B SaaS strongly preferred
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About Kong:
Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is building the connectivity layer of AI. Trusted by the Fortune 500® and AI-native startups alike, Kong’s unified API and AI platform enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI traffic — on any model, any cloud. For more information, visit www.konghq.com.