Head of Growth Job Description: 2026 Template, Salary & Hiring Guide

A head of growth job description defines the person who owns the entire growth funnel — acquisition, activation, retention, and revenue — as one system. It sits above growth-marketer individual contributors and next to (or, at earlier stages, in place of) a VP of Marketing. If you can't describe who owns the growth number end-to-end, you don't have this role yet.

This guide gives you a copy-ready JD, 2026 comp benchmarks, the KPIs to hold the hire to, and a decision framework for full-time versus fractional. You'll leave with a document you can post today and a clear read on whether you should hire now or in six months.

What Is a Head of Growth?

A head of growth is the senior operator who owns the full-funnel growth number for a company. That usually means pipeline, revenue, and retention rolled into one target. The role blends channel strategy across paid, SEO, lifecycle, and product-led loops with experimentation and analytics. It is a leadership seat, not an execution seat.

The confusion is real, so keep the distinction sharp. A growth marketer is an individual contributor running experiments in one or two channels. A VP of Marketing owns brand, comms, product marketing, and pipeline; growth is one lever in a wider portfolio. A head of growth narrows the scope: distribution and revenue math, less brand. The growth-practitioner community at Reforge has been mapping this distinction for years and treats the role as separate from CMO track roles.

At sub-Series-A companies, the founder often fills the seat. At Series A through C, a head of growth is one of the first named leadership hires. Product-led companies tend to bring one in before a VP of Marketing; sales-led companies typically hire the VP first. The role usually reports to the CEO, CMO, or COO. It manages 2–6 direct reports at Series B and 6–12 at growth stage.

For a wider view of where the seat fits in the org, see the marketing team structure guide and the startup marketing team structure breakdown by stage.

Head of Growth Job Description Template (Copy-Paste)

The template below covers role overview, responsibilities, requirements, KPIs, and comp. Paste it into Ashby, Greenhouse, LinkedIn, or your careers page and edit the bracketed sections. It follows the structure hiring managers at Series A–C SaaS companies tend to converge on, informed by public JDs and First Round Review hiring guidance.

Role: Head of Growth
Reports to: [CEO / CMO / COO]
Location: [Remote / Hybrid / City]
Team size: [X direct reports at hire, scaling to Y]

About the role

You will own [Company]'s growth number: pipeline, revenue, retention, or the composite that matters most at our stage. That means running the acquisition portfolio (paid, SEO, content, partnerships, lifecycle), the experimentation cadence, and the analytics infrastructure that shows what is actually working. You will hire and manage the growth team, own the weekly growth review, and be accountable to the board on a small set of numbers.

What you will do

• Own the growth target end-to-end: acquisition, activation, retention, and expansion.
• Set the channel mix and reallocate budget monthly based on measured CAC and LTV.
• Run a weekly experimentation cadence with a public backlog, hypothesis, and readout.
• Build and manage a growth team of [X] across paid, SEO, lifecycle, and analytics.
• Partner with product on activation, onboarding, and in-product growth loops.
• Report growth results and forecasts to the CEO and board on a monthly cadence.
• Own the growth stack: attribution, experimentation tooling, CDP, warehouse pipes.

What you need to have done

• 6+ years operating in growth or performance marketing, at least 2 in a management role.
• Direct P&L or budget ownership for a $2M+ marketing spend.
• Shipped and measured 50+ growth experiments. You can talk through five of them from memory, including the ones that failed.
• Built a channel mix from at least two of: paid social, paid search, SEO/content, lifecycle, partnerships, product-led loops.
• Worked at a company between $2M and $50M ARR (or the DTC/consumer equivalent). You know what breaks at each stage.

What we will measure you on

• Pipeline or ARR growth against target (quarterly).
• CAC payback and CAC:LTV ratio (monthly).
• Activation rate on the primary product event (weekly).
• Retention curve stabilization by cohort (monthly).
• Experiment velocity: at least [X] readouts per quarter.

Compensation

• Base: $[180–240K] depending on stage and location.
• OTE: base plus 20–35% variable tied to the growth target.
• Equity: [0.25%–1.0%] depending on stage.
• Benefits: [standard package].

Cut the sections that don't apply and edit the numbers to match your stage. If you're pre-Series-A, drop the P&L requirement and lean on the experiment count. If you're a DTC brand, replace "pipeline" with "new-customer revenue."

Head of Growth Responsibilities & KPIs

The responsibility list matters less than the KPI mapping. An experienced head of growth reads a JD by scanning for what they will actually be held to. Assign each responsibility a measurable outcome. Vague ownership ("owns growth") produces vague results. Specific KPIs ("CAC payback under 12 months") give the hire something to defend.

Seven responsibilities show up on nearly every 2026 JD for this seat:

1. Own the growth number. KPI: quarterly pipeline or ARR against plan. Everything else derives from this.
2. Manage the acquisition portfolio. KPI: blended CAC and channel-level CAC. Paid, SEO, content, and partnerships get reallocated monthly.
3. Run the experimentation system. KPI: experiments shipped per quarter and a rolling win rate. Reforge's growth teams tend to target 30–50% win rates with 8–15 experiments per quarter.
4. Build the growth team. KPI: hire-to-productive-time, retention of direct reports, quality of the experiment backlog.
5. Partner with product on activation and retention. KPI: activation rate on the primary event, retention curve by cohort.
6. Own reporting and forecasting. KPI: forecast accuracy against actuals, monthly board deck delivered on time.
7. Manage the growth stack. KPI: attribution reliability (spot-check accuracy above 90%), warehouse pipeline uptime, tool spend efficiency.

Some JDs add an eighth line: lifecycle and CRM ownership as a standalone responsibility. That is fine, especially at consumer or DTC companies where lifecycle drives half the revenue. See the demand generation team structure piece for how those functions split at scale.

If you can't sign off on the KPIs, the JD isn't ready to post. The hire will show up in month one and ask which numbers you're grading them on. Give them a real answer before they walk in.

Skills & Experience to Require

A head of growth combines four skill layers: strategic (what to work on), analytical (how to measure it), operational (how to ship it), and managerial (who runs it). Missing any one layer and the seat wobbles. Junior candidates lean analytical or operational. Senior candidates add the strategic and managerial layers.

Must-haves (non-negotiable):

• Direct experience owning a growth or performance marketing target at a company in your revenue band.
• Fluency in at least three of: paid social, paid search, SEO, lifecycle, content, partnerships, product-led loops.
• SQL literacy: the ability to write their own queries in the warehouse, not wait for a data analyst.
• Experiment design competence, including a working understanding of statistical significance and minimum detectable effect.
• Management experience: 2+ years leading direct reports, ideally including a hire and a fire.

Nice-to-haves (upgrades, not requirements):

• Product-led growth experience if you are a self-serve SaaS company.
• International expansion experience if you are pre-launching abroad.
• Lifecycle and CRM systems fluency (Iterable, Braze, Customer.io) at consumer companies.
• Executive-comms experience. Reading a board deck to a room of investors without freezing.
• A public writing or speaking track record. It is a proxy for pattern recognition.

The trap here is over-indexing on channel expertise. A head of growth who is a 10/10 paid marketer but a 4/10 manager will fail. The seat is a leadership seat first, a channel seat second. When in doubt, weight management and analytical fluency over any single channel. If you need channel depth you can hire specialists in paid search or SEO underneath the head of growth.

2026 Salary & Comp Benchmarks

A US-based, full-time head of growth in 2026 lands at $180–280K base with total cash between $220K and $350K, depending on company stage, location, and remote policy. Series B tech is the modal band at roughly $220K base and $270K OTE. Equity ranges from 0.25% at growth stage to over 1.0% at seed. Public comp data from Payscale and Levels.fyi both cluster in this range for the marketing-leadership category.

The table below shows the ranges founders and finance leaders are budgeting in 2026 across a US remote-hybrid range. Numbers assume cash comp only; equity depends on stage.

For public tech comp comparisons, Levels.fyi is the fastest cross-check. Search for growth marketing manager or head of growth and adjust for company stage. For a full-team cost benchmark that includes the ICs reporting into this seat, see the MarketerHire breakdown on what a marketing team should cost. The numbers above only cover the leader. Plan for another $400K–$1.2M in fully-loaded team cost around them at Series B.

Fractional rates run higher on an hourly basis because you pay only for time worked and skip the equity, benefits, and severance carry. A vetted fractional head of growth engaged through MarketerHire typically runs $200–350 per hour or $6–15K per month for 10–20 hours per week.

Head of Growth vs Related Roles

A head of growth is not a VP of Marketing, not a growth marketer, and not a CMO, even though the four titles overlap in messy real-world orgs. The clean way to keep them straight: brand and comms sits with a CMO or VP Marketing. Funnel and experimentation sits with a head of growth. Single-channel execution sits with a growth marketer. Titles get sloppy at small companies, so read the JD, not the header.

At a Series A company with a head of growth and no VP Marketing, that head of growth is also the marketing leader by default. Expect them to touch brand and content, even if it isn't on the JD. Write it into responsibilities so the expectation is honest. For a broader disambiguation of adjacent titles, see the piece on what a marketing manager does.

When to Hire Full-Time, Fractional, or Not Yet

Hire a full-time head of growth when your ARR clears roughly $2M, you have at least two proven acquisition channels, and you are ready to give someone a team and a budget of $500K+ to manage. Hire a fractional head of growth when you need the strategy and pattern recognition but can't yet support the full-time seat. Don't hire at all if you don't have product-market fit. A great growth leader can't rescue a broken product.

Use this framework:

• You have PMF signal, under $2M ARR, no marketing hire yet. Bring in a fractional head of growth for 10–15 hours per week. They build the plan and hire the ICs. You convert to full-time when the team is 3+ people.
• $2M–$20M ARR, one or two acquisition channels working, team of 2–5 marketers. Hire full-time. This is the seat's home stage.
• $20M+ ARR, mature team. Decide whether you want a head of growth reporting to a CMO, or a VP Growth title with peer status to a VP Marketing. This is when title politics start to matter.
• Pre-PMF, no repeatable acquisition. Don't hire. A senior growth hire without traction to work with will churn in six months. Get to signal first.

Most of the 30,000+ matches MarketerHire has placed skew toward the fractional path at seed and Series A, and full-time at Series B+. A 95% trial-to-hire rate on those matches is the honest signal on whether the framework holds. When the stage-fit is right, the hire works.

How to Hire a Head of Growth (in 2026)

A traditional full-time head of growth search takes 3 to 6 months from JD to signed offer. Sourcing, screens, panel, references, offer negotiation. Fractional or contract-to-hire compresses that to 48 hours through a vetted marketplace. The path you pick should follow your urgency and your certainty about the role.

The process, whichever path you choose:

1. Lock the JD and KPIs. Use the template above. Do not open the search until the KPI list is signed off by CEO and CFO.
2. Decide comp and stage-appropriate title. Base, OTE, equity. Don't call the seat "VP Growth" if the pay is head-of-growth.
3. Source three ways in parallel. Your network, a targeted LinkedIn jobs search, and a specialist marketplace. Do not lean on a generalist recruiter for this seat.
4. Run a work-sample screen, not a case study. Ask candidates to teardown your public funnel and propose the first 90 days. This filters out the "growth theatre" candidates immediately.
5. Reference twice. Once with peers, once with a direct report. Direct reports are the most honest source.
6. Offer with a 30/60/90 built in. If the hire won't commit to a written 30/60/90 by day 15, the wrong hire got past the panel.

If the full-time timeline doesn't fit your board update, a fractional head of growth is the honest compromise. MarketerHire has matched fractional growth leaders across 6,000+ customers in the $2M–$50M ARR band. The median first-match arrives within 48 hours and 95% of two-week trials convert to ongoing engagements. If you want the leadership seat covered without the search, the fractional CMO / growth leader path is the closest match.