Head of Performance Marketing in London

Growth is hard. There is no playbook. There is a relentless cycle of diagnosing what is broken, finding the thing that might fix it, convincing people to try it, running it properly, and then starting all over again when you hit the next ceiling. We are looking for someone who has broken through those ceilings before. Someone who has been personally responsible for growing a startup or challenger brand, ideally from the inside. Who wants to own the problem not just manage the process. Someone who is genuinely curious about what AI is doing to paid media right now. Not because it looks good on a CV, but because they are already deep in it and have started forming a real view on what it changes.

This is a permanent, full-time role. We're growing fast — 2.5x year on year — and we're building out our growth strategy team to keep pace. We want someone who will step in with care and confidence, build strong relationships with our clients and team, and do brilliant work for the long run. If that sounds like you, we would love to hear from you.

About Ballpoint: We launched in January 2023 with a clear view: the best growth agencies of the 2010s were either performance shops or creative shops. We built Ballpoint to be both. Our founder Josh ran his own startup (Wine List) and was first employee and head of growth at Thriva. That background shapes how we work: we care about outcomes, not just outputs. We are analytically rigorous and creatively ambitious, and we try to be genuinely honest with our clients, even when that is a harder conversation. We are a team of 20, evenly split between creative and technical. We work with 20+ clients across paid social, paid search, retention, and CRO. For clients we have worked with for over a year, we have tripled their monthly marketing spend on average, while improving profitability. We are proud of that. We have grown 2.5x YoY, and we plan to keep that going. This is a pivotal moment to join, and we do not say that lightly.

About this role: This is a permanent role on our growth strategy team. Day to day, you will lead strategy, analysis, and account management for a set of clients, working closely with our creative strategists, media buyers, creative studio, and data engineers. You will generate the ideas, shape them into experiments, explain them to clients, and run them carefully. The wins and the misses both sit with you. The core specialism is paid social. We need someone with deep, hands‑on experience scaling accounts from smaller budgets to meaningful spend, ideally in the range of £15‑25K per month to £100‑200K+ per month. But we also want someone with enough breadth to understand how all the channels play together. As we grow, so does this role. There's real scope to take on a bigger book of clients, help shape how the team works, and grow into more senior responsibility over time. We'd love for whoever joins to build their career here.

On AI and paid media: Something is genuinely shifting in the industry right now. The way paid social is bought, optimised, and creatively briefed is changing fast, and AI is at the centre of it. We are figuring it out in real time, the same as everyone else. We are not looking for someone who has a polished take on this. We are looking for someone who is already in it: testing tools in their workflow, thinking honestly about what AI is and is not good for, and curious about how the role of a growth strategist actually changes as the tooling underneath it changes. This matters to us. It is part of how we think about growth right now, and we want to work through it with someone who finds it as pivotal as we do.

What you will bring to the role:

• Direct, personal responsibility for growing at least one startup or challenger brand (in‑house experience strongly preferred)
• Deep experience scaling paid social accounts profitably, from smaller budgets to significant spend
• Strong analytical skills: you are comfortable pulling and making sense of data, not just reading dashboards
• Real understanding of attribution windows, the breakdown effect, and how measurement frameworks actually work in practice (attribution, incrementality, MMM)
• Excellent communication: you can explain complex things clearly to smart non‑specialists, and hold your own with experienced practitioners
• A genuine interest in how AI is changing paid media, with evidence of experimenting with it in your own work

Good to have:

• Working experience in at least one other channel: paid search, CRO, affiliates, SEO
• Growth modelling and forecasting (we build models covering retention, payback, LTV for clients)
• Data analysis using SQL or Python
• Direct response copywriting
• Experience running lift or incrementality tests, or building or interpreting MMMs
• Experience building growth loops across the customer lifecycle
• Brand marketing experience, particularly with measurement
• Creative strategy: if you have built ads yourself that actually converted, or uncovered key learnings
• Process‑driven and operationally minded

What we offer:

• £70‑90k salary depending on experience
• Share options through our EMI scheme
• £1,500 tech budget
• Closed office between Christmas and New Year
• Monthly socials and regular team lunches
• Quarterly wellness budget
• Christmas and summer parties
• Annual company offsite in France

The process:

• Application via Google form
• Initial 30‑minute phone screen: motivation, communication, high‑level fit
• Two in‑person interviews, one with the founder and one with the existing growth team