Head of Performance Marketing

Bark is hiring a Head of Performance Marketing to join our Marketing leadership team. We’re running two commercial models in parallel: pay-per-lead and subscription. We need a marketplace operator with hands-on experience in both.

You’ll own the entire paid acquisition stack across Google, Meta, Bing, TikTok, programmatic, paid social, paid search and emerging channels. A multi-million annual budget across 11 markets and 1,000+ services categories. You’ll lead the Performance function within our ~30-person marketing team across UK, India and Spain, partnering daily with SEO and Content, with the Trading team on the supply and demand side, and with the Brand Designer on creative. The discipline itself is moving into an agentic era: Advantage+, PMax, AI creative pipelines, LLM-driven search. If you’ve lived inside a services or two-sided marketplace operating one or both of these commercial models, this is your role.

Responsibilities

• Own Paid Acquisition End-To-End: Every biddable channel rolls up to you. Paid search, paid social, programmatic, app and emerging. Multi-million annual spend across 11 markets. Strategy, allocation, account architecture, bid logic, creative testing rhythm, measurement. You’re accountable for the number, not the dashboards.

• Engineer Two-Sided, Marketplace-Aware Allocation: Bark is two-sided and the economics are not symmetric. Supply and demand move independently across 1,000+ services × 11 countries. You build the allocation logic that optimises for marketplace outcome (not “best ROAS wins”) and run the rebalancing rhythm with the Trading team.

• Run Both Commercial Models In Parallel: You keep the pay-per-lead engine healthy and you re-instrument acquisition and measurement for the subscription side. Two scoreboards, one operator. You defend both frameworks to leadership and the CFO.

• Run Creative At Performance Scale: Modern paid channels eat creative. You own the creative testing engine, brief our Brand Designer on paid systems, and productionise the AI creative pipeline (Nano Banana, Higgsfield, Remotion, Veo, Fal) so we ship variants in hours, not weeks. You also own the brand vs. performance budget split, defended with data.

• Build AI Into The Function: Agentic bidding, AI-driven creative, automated reporting, LLM-assisted account auditing. You decide where AI compounds and where it adds noise. You partner with our Marketing AI & Automation Engineer to ship the agentic workflows that replace manual processes.

• Lead and Grow the Team: Inherit and develop the full Performance team across paid search, paid social, programmatic, creative ops and measurement. Raise the bar on craft. Define how Performance, SEO, CRM and Brand interlock so we operate as one acquisition system, not four silos.

Required Skills and Experience

• 8-12 years in performance / growth marketing, leading teams (4+). You’ve moved from individual contributor to leader without losing the individual contributor instinct

• Must have a background in the services marketplace: you’ve run multi-million paid budgets in a two-sided services marketplace. You know why marketplace allocation is structurally different from e-commerce

• Pay-per-lead and subscription model experience: you’ve operated a pay-per-lead marketplace at scale and you think natively in subscription economics. Direct experience of a transition from one model to the other is the tie-breaker

• Real scale on Google and Meta. Hands-on enough to challenge an agency or a channel lead on the actual setup, not just the headline metric

• AI-operational, not AI-curious. Strong point of view on Advantage+ / PMax, AI creative pipelines and agentic bidding. You know what’s signal vs. hype

• Strong point of view on measurement, incrementality, MMM and MTA, and the political skill to land an attribution framework across leadership and finance.

• Strong point of view on brand vs. performance budget allocation, defended with data

• Working knowledge of Tableau, our BI layer, GA4 and modern measurement. Fluency with the Google Ads and Meta APIs is a plus

• Strong plus: multi-market scale, 5+ countries simultaneously, ideally including the US and UK

• Plus: Spain-market context and comfort working with the Spanish marketplace ecosystem

• Excellent written and spoken English. Comfortable working async with UK, India and Spain teammates