Director, Performance Marketing

Are you ready to unlock intelligence?

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 Rev Ops, and regularly translate performance into clear recommendations for senior leadership.

• 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, Rev Ops, Finance, Sales, and regional teams to align priorities and translate GTM objectives into effective investment and execution.

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.

• 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…