Director of Performance Marketing (Remote, Houston)

Full-time, Remote (USA, Canada, or South Africa)

About the Role

Blacksmith Agency runs PPC and SEO for clients across multifamily, B2B, and technical verticals. As Director of Performance Marketing you lead that department. The PPC strategist and the SEO strategist report to you and they are the specialists in their channels. Right now nobody owns this function, which is the whole reason this seat is open. This is a management seat, not a senior individual contributor one. You will not be building campaigns, and on technical SEO your strategist will know more than you do. That is the arrangement, not a gap. You carry channel strategy and where budget goes as accounts scale. The strategists carry the execution of it, and you carry whether the department delivers.

Responsibilities

• Manage the PPC strategist and the SEO strategist: their quality bar, their development, their reviews, and the call when someone is not going to get there.
• Define and uphold the standard the work is held to — what a good audit looks like, what gets checked before work leaves the agency, how an account is reported.
• Own client results across the whole function, including whether reporting is honest (e.g., auditing attribution and GA4 accuracy).
• Serve as the escalation point when an account is at risk: diagnose the issue, direct the strategist who fixes it, and join the client call.
• Set channel strategy and allocate budget as accounts scale.
• Define what we tell sales we can credibly deliver before it gets sold.
• Create and execute the hiring plan for the department, including first-round interviews for your own team, within about a quarter.

Requirements

• Direct management experience: strategists or specialists have reported to you, and you owned their reviews, development, and performance-management decisions. Managing accounts alone does not qualify.
• 7+ years across both paid media and SEO. Owning one channel while sitting beside the other does not count.
• Sufficient depth in Google Ads, GA4, Search Console, Meta Ads, and Microsoft Ads to distinguish good work from work that merely looks good — a lower bar than doing it yourself, but higher than reading a report.
• At least one account you turned around where you can articulate the metric, the before/after figures, and why the change worked. The diagnosis must have been yours, regardless of who executed.
• Comfort being the client-facing owner when an account underperforms; that call comes to you, not the strategist.
• Agency experience carrying many accounts simultaneously.
• Disqualifiers: no one has ever reported to you, or you have never owned a review or performance-managed anyone; you have only ever run one channel; all your experience is in-house on a single brand; you want to keep building campaigns yourself (this is a different job).

Process

Three conversations, then a decision: a 30-minute screen with our recruiter, a first round with the founder this seat reports to, and a final round. No take-home project and no panel interview.