Paid Social + Search Performance Manager/Lead/Head of in City of London

KatKin goes all-in for cat health. We’re pioneering a new category of fresh cat food: 100% human-quality meat, made daily in Suffolk, fresh to your fridge. Where the competition cuts corners, we put nutrition and cat wellbeing first. No shortcuts. No secret recipes. We’re cutting the fluff, thinking fresh, growing rapidly and fighting for industry-wide change — and longer cat lives.

As a disruptor in the $185bn pet food market, KatKin was founded to challenge the low standards set by the traditional cat food industry, which is worth $50bn globally. The concept for fresh food is well established in the US, particularly in Dog, with the Farmers’ Dog surpassing >$1B in sales proving the scale of the opportunity.

KatKin operates a direct-to-consumer (DTC) model supported by vertically integrated R&D, manufacturing, sales, and marketing teams. To date, we’ve delivered over 60 million fresh meals to over 250,000 happy, healthy cats across the UK. Our team of over 150 spans several locations, including London and our state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Haverhill, Suffolk.

We’re a fast-paced startup making serious waves and bursting with energy. You’ll be surrounded by big creative thinkers and brand minds, a world-first team of cat scientists and nutritionists, business brains who’ve been there before, and a whole team of hardcore cat parents. All on a mission to make 100% fresh, real healthy food the new standard in cat care.

The Role: We’ve built a world-class Meta engine in-house — creative strategists, producers, creators and editors scaling to thousands of ads a month. It drives serious growth, helping cat owners everywhere learn about fresh food and switch to a healthier diet. Now we want someone to own paid social performance end-to-end — not just “run campaigns”, but build the system that makes repeatable, scalable growth machines across not only Meta but also Google and TikTok.

This role sits right at the intersection of:

• Channel Performance (CAC, MER, payback, profitability)
• Digital Product (conversion through strong and consistent customer journey)
• Creative (what wins attention + converts)
• Execution (fast testing, fast learning, fast scaling)

Key ownership areas:

• Own Paid digital performance (Meta first) across Meta, Google (including YouTube), and TikTok, managing budgets and pacing with a commercial mindset (efficiency, scale, payback), and establishing industry leading media buying strategy.
• Drive creative performance by partnering closely with our paid social creative team and influencer marketing team, feeding back with a data-driven and hypothesis-driven approach, and translating performance insights into better ads.
• Build a ruthless testing machine to run structured experimentation of creatives, offers, digital experiences. Move fast, learn weekly, improve daily.
• Partner cross-functionally with Retention, Digital Product, Engineering, Finance and Analytics teams to build robust deep dive methods and uncover needle moving areas for performance improvement, and to contribute to attribution framework improvement to go beyond surface metrics to scale marketing efficiency to the next level.
• Build and Manage external relationships with platform reps and media buying agencies to deliver results, and stay connected with industry leading networks to constantly improve your own craft.

If you are joining at Lead/Head of level, you’ll also:

• Set strategy for current and new paid social channels.
• Hire, coach + develop talent in paid performance media buying and performance creative.
• Lead charge in integrating strategy and workstreams across multiple digital paid channels, including YouTube, TikTok, and Influencer Marketing.

Who we are looking for: We don’t care where you learned your craft. We care that you can grow a business through paid social. You could be our superstar if you have:

• Strong hands-on experience running paid social/paid acquisition in a fast-paced environment (DTC/ecom/subscription is a big plus), with significant exposure on Meta/Facebook/Instagram and/or TikTok.
• Proven experience managing large scale paid social budgets and delivering measurable impact at scale.
• Deep expertise in Meta’s ad ecosystem: Ads Manager, Advantage+, SKAN/AEM, custom audiences/lookalikes, placement optimisation, creative formats (Reels, Stories, etc). You stay up to date with Meta’s evolving features and can quickly adopt new tactics.
• Excellent analytical ability — you can diagnose performance quickly and act decisively, and are comfortable with querying data sets and learning new tools, and diving into technical diagnosis with the tech team.
• Creative mindset + test-and-learn ethos: you brief creative, drive A/B and multivariate tests, iterate quickly and scale what works.
• Strong collaboration & stakeholder skills: you’ll work across Growth, Product, Analytics and Marketing and present to senior leadership, so you must communicate complex analysis into clear, strategic insights.
• Comfortable operating in a fast-moving environment, prioritising experiments, optimising rapidly and managing ambiguity.

Nice to haves:

• TikTok and/or YouTube paid experience.
• Experience improving tracking/attribution (e.g., CAPI, GA4, incrementality thinking).
• Experience managing others or leading agency relationships.

What We Offer:

• Competitive salary
• AXA Health Insurance, including optical and dental coverage
• Annual Professional Development Budget
• Company-contributed pension

Culture and Perks:

• A small, close-knit team with no egos
• 33 holiday days each year