Head of Paid Media

About the role

You'll take full ownership of paid acquisition across Meta, Google, TikTok and AppLovin, managing $3–5M in monthly spend. This is a strategy and ownership role. You'll have a team of junior media buyers who handle the implementation, from building and launching campaigns, ad uploads, naming conventions, and day-to-day platform work. Your job is to set the strategy, make budget changes, direct their work, and make sure we scale efficiently as spend grows.

Responsibilities

• Performance and P&L: CAC, MER and blended contribution margin across all paid channels
• Spend planning and budget allocation: across Meta, Google, TikTok and AppLovin
• Scaling decisions: when to push, when to pull back, and the evidence behind both
• Forecasting and hitting your forecasts
• Channel strategy:
  • Meta as the dominant channel: account structure, campaign architecture, audience and placement strategy, testing framework
  • Google (Brand, PMax, Shopping, YouTube) and TikTok as diversification and incremental-volume plays
  • AppLovin, a serious and growing part of our mix; you'll be expected to already know how to buy here and how to scale it
  • Owning the mix: deciding where the next dollar goes and being able to defend it with numbers
• Leading the buying team:
  • Direct a team of junior media buyers who execute your strategy in-platform
  • Set clear priorities, review their work, and hold the quality bar on launches
  • Build the SOPs, QA checks and onboarding that let us add buyers without adding chaos
  • Develop them, we want buyers who get better under you, and we want you to set the bar for the next hires
• Testing and creative direction:
  • A disciplined, documented testing calendar: hypotheses, sample sizes, read windows, kill criteria
  • Close partnership with our creative pods: you own the brief-back loop, telling the creative team what's working, what's dying and what to make next. You don't make the ads; you make sure we make the right ones.
  • Offer, landing page and funnel testing in partnership with web and retention
• Measurement:
  • Own the truth on attribution. We run third-party measurement alongside platform reporting and we know platform numbers are inflated, you'll be expected to have a defensible point of view on incrementality and to decide on real numbers, not comfortable ones.
  • Reporting a founder can read in five minutes and trust
• What success looks like:
  • First 30 days — You know our accounts better than anyone. You've audited structure, spend efficiency and measurement, and delivered a written diagnosis with the three biggest efficiency leaks and how you'd fix them. Within the first 7 days you’ve gone through the full onboarding needed for you to take over day-to-day media buying and are ready after week 1 to take over the current setup, while changing it to how it should stand along the way.
  • First 90 days — Day-to-day buying runs through you and your team, not through a founder. Testing cadence is live and documented. You're running a weekly performance review that drives real decisions.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in paid media, performance marketing, or customer acquisition
• You have personally managed $1M+ per month in paid media spend — not overseen it from a distance
• Deep, hands-on Meta expertise. Non-negotiable. You should have strong opinions about account structure and be able to explain your reasoning.
• Direct experience across Google, TikTok and AppLovin — we're not looking for someone who will learn these on our budget
• Real fluency in unit economics: CAC, MER, AOV, LTV, contribution margin. You can build the model, not just read the dashboard.
• Experience with third-party attribution and a healthy scepticism about platform-reported numbers
• You've managed media buyers before and can show what you built to make them better

Nice to have

• Beauty, skincare or supplements experience
• Experience selling to women 45+, or in any category where trust and proof of efficacy matter more than novelty
• AppLovin or other emerging channels taken from zero to scale
• Amazon Ads
• You've worked in a founder-led business and know how to take something over rather than wait to be handed it

How you work

• You move fast and decide with incomplete information
• You'd rather be corrected than be wrong for a quarter
• You are comfortable telling a founder their favourite campaign isn't working
• You want ownership, not a brief

Benefits

• Real ownership of the most important function in the business, with a direct line to the founders
• Remote-first, async-friendly, results-measured
• A brand with genuine product-market fit and room to scale