Director of Performance Marketing

Karbon is the global leader in AI-powered practice management software for accounting firms, providing a cloud platform for accounting professionals. The Director of Performance Marketing will lead the paid media strategy and drive digital growth by leveraging AI tools and optimizing customer engagement across various platforms.

Responsibilities:

• Own Karbon's paid media portfolio with agency support across SEM, paid social, display, retargeting, content syndication, and review platforms - leveraging AI-powered bidding, audience modeling, and creative optimization to maximize performance
• Manage a multi-million dollar demand gen and advertising budget and maintain the highest standards for ROAS and payback period efficiencies
• Apply AI-driven tools and platforms to improve targeting precision, reduce CAC, and scale what works
• Partner closely with Sales and RevOps to align paid investment with pipeline targets - using predictive analytics and AI-assisted forecasting to sharpen planning
• Build rigorous measurement frameworks and attribution models, incorporating AI-assisted analysis to surface insights faster and connect spend to revenue outcomes with greater confidence
• Own karbonhq.com as a high-performing commercial asset - along with leading the team responsible for traffic quality, conversion rate optimization (CRO), and pipeline contribution and web development
• Deploy AI-powered personalization, dynamic content, and intelligent chat to improve on-site engagement and accelerate the path from visit to conversion
• Lead experimentation at scale - using AI-assisted testing tools to run more experiments faster, identify winning variants sooner, and continuously compound conversion improvements
• Ensure the site is structured and tagged for maximum discoverability by both traditional crawlers and AI ingestion pipelines, treating technical site health as a strategic competitive lever
• Own Karbon's presence on G2 and other review platforms as both a paid and organic performance channel, covering category sponsorship, profile optimization, review generation programs, and the deployment of G2 assets (badges, comparison pages, buyer intent signals) as conversion tools across the site and campaigns
• Own and lead Karbon's strategy across the full modern search stack - traditional SEO, generative engine optimization (GEO), answer engine optimization (AEO), and agentic search channels
• Drive Karbon's visibility and authority inside AI-native discovery surfaces - including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude, Copilot, and the growing ecosystem of AI agents that research and recommend software on behalf of buyers
• Develop a structured approach to being cited, referenced, and recommended by AI models - understanding how large language models retrieve and surface brand information, and building content and technical strategies that improve Karbon's presence in those outputs
• Anticipate and build for the agentic web: as AI agents increasingly handle research, comparison, and vendor shortlisting on behalf of human buyers, ensure Karbon's digital footprint is optimized to be discovered, understood, and recommended by those agents
• Collaborate with content, product marketing, and engineering to continuously evolve site architecture, structured data, and content strategy in response to how AI models index and interpret information
• Design and execute integrated growth campaigns across the full customer lifecycle - from AI-assisted prospecting and first-touch acquisition through expansion and retention
• Use AI tools to accelerate campaign development: faster creative iteration, smarter audience segmentation, AI-generated copy variants tested at scale, and intelligent send-time and channel optimization
• Build and optimize nurture programs powered by behavioral signals and AI-driven lead scoring - ensuring the right message reaches the right prospect at the right moment
• Partner with product marketing, customer success, and sales to develop campaigns that grow pipeline at the top of funnel and accelerate revenue within the existing customer base
• Own Karbon's buyer intent data strategy, selecting and managing intent platforms (such as G2 Buyer Intent, Bombora, or 6sense), and operationalizing intent signals across paid targeting, outbound prioritization, and lifecycle campaign triggers to ensure the team is acting on in-market behavior in real time
• Champion AI adoption across the demand generation function. Identify, evaluate, and implement AI tools and processes that meaningfully improve lead to set speed, quality, and output - from creative demand gen production and workflows to analytics and reporting
• Build and document AI-enhanced workflows that allow a lean team to operate with the output of a much larger one: scaling content, campaigns, and experimentation without proportional headcount growth
• Stay current on the rapidly evolving AI tool landscape, from LLM-powered marketing platforms to autonomous campaign agents, and bring relevant innovations to the team before competitors do
• Foster a culture of intelligent experimentation: encourage the team to test new AI capabilities, share learnings, and continuously raise the bar on what modern marketing operations look like

Requirements:

• 8+ years of performance marketing experience, with at least 3 years in a senior leadership role in a B2B SaaS environment
• Deep B2B vertical SaaS experience is required - you understand the nuances of marketing to a specific professional audience and have owned pipeline and revenue targets in a SaaS context
• A genuine practitioner of AI in marketing - not someone who talks about AI, but someone who uses it daily, builds with it, and has meaningfully changed how their team works because of it
• Demonstrable expertise in AI-native and agentic search - you understand how GEO, AEO, and agentic discovery channels work, why they matter, and how to build strategy around them; this is a hard requirement, not a nice-to-have
• Proven track record in paid media strategy - managing significant budgets across SEM, paid social, and programmatic, with command of AI-powered ad platforms and performance optimization
• Experience owning website performance as a commercial metric - with measurable CRO outcomes and a track record of deploying personalization and AI-assisted optimization
• Data-driven and analytically rigorous - you build attribution models, question default dashboards, and make decisions grounded in evidence rather than instinct alone
• A strong cross-functional leader who can align content, product, engineering, and sales around a coherent digital and AI search strategy
• Clear and confident communicator - able to translate AI strategy and performance data into executive-ready narrative and business impact
• Experience in accounting, professional services, or practice management software is a plus, but not required