VP of Performance Marketing at Pearl West – San Diego, California

Pearl West is an owner-operator holdco, deep in the ecommerce space, focused on scaling the brands we own. We are self-funded. No external capital, no VC pressure, no portfolio padding. We move fast, we operate what we own, and we obsess over the details that make a brand work: the product, the creative, the funnel, the customer experience, the unit economics.

Our current focus is our pet brand, with strong traction across Amazon, TikTok Shop, and DTC, serving hundreds of thousands of customers across North America. Our portfolio also includes brands in health and wellness, all subscription-driven with strong recurring revenue. Profitable. Self-funded. On a clear path to a meaningful outcome over the next 18 to 24 months.

We are looking for killer operators to join us.

We are hiring a VP of Performance Marketing to run paid acquisition end to end. You will own Meta, Google, TikTok, AppLovin, and Snapchat. You will lead the creative strategist and editor team responsible for feeding the machine. You will own the numbers week over week, quarter over quarter.

You inherit a team of roughly 20 (creative strategists, editors, a media buyer, a CRO analyst) and a mandate to scale new customer revenue 5x in 12 months.

This is not a strategy seat. This is not a brand seat. This is the seat where you personally open Ads Manager every day, diagnose campaigns in real time, make scaling calls on the fly, and ship winners on Saturday if Saturday is when the work is. You own the P&L for new customer acquisition.

Paid media is the engine that funds everything else. Every new product, every new category, every new brand we want to launch is downstream of our ability to profitably acquire customers at scale.

We need an operator who has scaled paid before and wants to do it again. Someone who has sat in the chair at $50K a day, $100K a day, and beyond, and knows exactly what breaks as you climb. Someone who can diagnose a CPM spike in 10 minutes, rebuild a fatigued creative hook in a day, and push daily spend past levels this team has not seen before.

• Full P&L accountability for DTC new customer revenue
• Meta as primary channel. Google Ads, TikTok Ads, AppLovin, and Snapchat Ads as supporting channels.
• Daily pacing, budget allocation, bid strategy, audience testing, and campaign restructuring across all paid channels
• Scaling daily Meta spend to $100K+ on a single brand while holding target ncROAS
• Hitting target ncROAS and increasing total ad spend, quarter over quarter
• Triangulating platform ROAS with incrementality testing and MMM to find the real number

• Lead the creative strategist team and editor bench. Set output SLAs per role.
• Ship 80+ net-new variants per week by Month 4, scaling to 150+ by Month 9
• Own the creative supply chain end to end: briefs, scripts, production, QA, testing, iteration
• Diagnose creative fatigue, hooks, scripts, pacing, and narrative performance in real time
• Build a concept library that compounds quarter over quarter, not one that resets every 90 days
• Direct the creative testing calendar across personas, angles, and category entry points

• Launch a statistical testing framework with clear win criteria and kill rules
• Own the relationship between ad messaging and landing page congruence
• Strong copywriting skills. Know how to write and direct hooks, body copy, and CTAs that convert.
• Deep understanding of funnel structure: listicles, advertorials, sales pages, long-form VSLs, short-form landers, quiz funnels
• CRO pattern recognition. See a page, know what will move the needle without needing 30 days of data to tell you.

• Data-driven decision making. Every call backed by numbers, not opinion.
• Build and maintain the contribution margin waterfall, CAC/LTV models, and payback period analysis
• Deliver a weekly 60-second update to the CEO. No slides. Just numbers.

• Lead with strong performance management. Set clear expectations. Hold people accountable.
• Experience hiring and firing. You have made both calls before and will make both again.
• Comfortable with hard conversations. You give direct feedback without softening it to the point of meaninglessness.
• Manage agency relationships for performance. Set clear deliverables. Cut quickly when performance lags.

If every line below feels like we wrote it about you, you are probably the person we are hiring.

• You have personally managed $100K+/day Meta spend on a single brand as an employee
• You live in Ads Manager. Your daily pulse on the account is muscle memory, not a weekly report.
• You understand that CAC is not a constraint to protect, it is an output you can raise. You know how to improve margin, AOV, bundle mix, subscription stick rate, and second-order rate so you can afford to pay more than your competitors to acquire a customer.
• Creative volume is your weapon. You know volume matters, but you also know that a brilliant insight or a better hook can unlock more than a thousand new ad variants.
• You do not rely on agencies to do the thinking for you
• You ship imperfect ads on Thursday over perfect ads next Tuesday
• You speak in specific numbers unprompted. CAC, ncROAS, spend levels, hit rates. No generalities.
• You have a kill rule for losing ads and you stick to it
• You have scaled from $10K a day to $100K a day and you know exactly what breaks at each level
• You obsess over acquisition quality that retains, not just first-order ROAS
• You are a builder: systems, processes, dashboards, creative pipelines
• You have hired and fired editors, strategists, and media buyers yourself
• You thrive in a founder-led, high-tempo environment with no bureaucracy
• You care about building something valuable long-term, not just collecting a paycheck
• You operate with urgency. You do not wait for Monday to act on what you saw Friday.
• You treat every day the account is underperforming as a day you are personally losing money

If any of these feel like you, we respect the honesty but this is not the role.

• You peaked at $30K/day Meta spend, or your spend was split across multiple brands
• Your creative output at peak was 10 to 20 ads per week
• You brief agencies and wait for deliverables
• You sit on tests for weeks before calling a winner or killer
• Your first instinct on a CAC spike is to request a dashboard, not open Ads Manager
• You need 90 days to audit before making changes
• You avoid hard conversations
• You want the stability and structure of a large corporate environment
• Your experience is primarily managing programs someone else built

• A product with real traction and a category poised for meaningful expansion
• Clean reporting line to the CEO. No matrix org, no dotted lines, no committees.
• Budget authority to move fast. Hire, fire, reallocate spend, and cut underperforming agencies without red tape.
• A CEO who supports and values growth, invests in the function, and gives you the runway to build
• A team of ~20 ready to be led by someone who knows what they are doing
• A path to meaningful equity outcomes within a defined window
• A fast-moving, profitable, self-funded company with real upside

Base salary starts at $250K USD and scales with experience and spend level owned in prior roles. Performance bonus is tied primarily to ncROAS, ncCAC, total ad spend, and revenue growth. Equity participation includes an opportunity to invest at a favorable valuation below internal mark.

If you are reading this and thinking 'this is exactly the role I have been waiting for,' we want to hear from you.

If you are reading this and thinking 'I could probably do this,' we are not the right fit. You want the seat where you know you can do the job before you walk in the door.

We are looking for the operator who has already scaled paid acquisition before and wants to do it again, with real ownership, real upside, and real speed.

If that is you, apply.

All applications go through this form. No DMs, email, or cover letters.

Apply here: https://forms.gle/zRLDH9XHw13L9fus8

Takes about 10 minutes. The form asks for specific numbers: peak daily Meta spend, ncROAS, weekly ad output, hit rate, unit economics. If you've done this work, these numbers live in your head.

We respond within 7 days to candidates we want to move forward with. The form closes as soon as we land the right operator.