Marketing Jobs Over $200K

Hello, Hello! Let’s show 2026 what we are made of even if it really tries to mess with us. A special hello to those newish subscribers (a few hundred of you) who found us via the newsletter “The AI Ready CMO.” We are very glad to have you here. So let’s get into it!

As of this week, there are 32,120 in-house marketing jobs posted across the U.S., down 2.2% year over year.

4,268 of those jobs are at Director-level or higher, marking a 3.7% increase from last year. Demand for senior marketing is holding up.

More than half of all postings (54.5%) now include salary information. The median salary for senior marketing roles currently sits at $155,002, while the overall median across all marketing jobs is $85,010.

Here’s how that breaks down by title:

• Chief Marketing Officer: $249,995

• SVP/Head of Marketing: $214,999

• VP/Director of Marketing: $164,996

• Marketing Manager: $121,254

• Marketing Specialist: $71,999

Regionally, salaries reflect familiar patterns. Los Angeles leads in median pay for senior marketing pros at $160,940 followed by Boston, and New York, both sitting above the $155K mark. New York also offers the most roles overall, by quite a stretch.

Median Salary for Director-level and Above in Top Hiring Cities

In this edition, we deliver on our CMOLadder promise by dissecting interesting job postings and unpacking org design, culture, motion, and risk across four very different archetypes.

This week, we feature a founder‑driven, creator‑economy boiler room where “attention is currency.” We highlight a role for an operating‑system architect in a large‑cap, AI‑heavy, M&A‑busy enterprise.​ Another posting dissected shows a PLG-to-enterprise bridge, story- and an ARR-driven PMM role in a no-code darling with a $4B Series C valuation.​ And finally, a mass‑retail Gen Z skincare brand moving from vibes and virality to clinical, retail, and boardroom credibility.​ What a wonderful mix to start the year!

Before we jump in, a lil’ reminder that freedom of voice still exists here because of our legal disclaimer.

Most JDs are written by HR. This one was written by a founder on their fourth espresso at 2 AM.

When a job description explicitly asks for candidates who are "Cracked" and "Psycho when it comes to execution," you are applying for a culture and a lifestyle. Whop is a marketplace for digital products that claims billions in GMV, but they are aggressively trying to pivot from "sketchy Discord hustles" to the "Nike of Entrepreneurship."

This is a high-paid tour of duty in the trenches of the Creator Economy. You aren't building a team from scratch; you are taking command of ~25 marketers in a 310-person company. But look closely at the org chart: the most common titles are Affiliate Marketing Specialist and Growth Specialist. You are inheriting a boiler room of performance marketers who live and die by the click. Your mandate is to somehow layer "Enterprise Marketing" and "Developer Experience" on top of this engine without breaking the speed that got them here. You are the "Adult in the Room" who is also expected to pull all-nighters.

The perks are designed for Lifestyle Capture and are rather…. unique. Free breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Check. Ubers home after 10 PM? Check. A $9,000 rent subsidy if you live within 4 blocks of the office? They want you relatively early in your career *cough* (4+ years experience for a Head of role), hungry, and devoid of boundaries.

If you like stable structures and quarterly planning cycles, walk away; if you want to live inside a founder’s brain at full tilt, this is the shot. If Taligence had this mandate we’d be looking for early-stage chaos pilots from Ramp or Brex, or alumni from Barstool Sports or MrBeast or VaynerMedia who understand that attention is the only currency that matters. The founder, Cameron Zoub, started as a teenager hacking sneaker drops - he values arbitrage over brand polish.

In a recent interview, Zoub revealed the company’s core philosophy: "Creators should create their own world." Whop is an App Store for Creators where they can plug in games, leaderboards, and chat. Don't pitch a brand campaign; pitch an Ecosystem. And here is the cheat code: Zoub is obsessed with the leadership book Turn the Ship Around!, specifically the phrase "I intend to." In your interview, don't ask "What do you think?"; say "I intend to build X because Y." It’s a psychological trigger that signals you are an owner.

When a $100B market cap company adds ‘Transformation’ to a VP title it acts as a Bat-Signal for a very specific kind of operator. At CrowdStrike, this is an architecture and silo-melting job. The complexity of a portfolio that has expanded to 23 products has simply outpaced the marketing OS. This is a role for a builder who can upgrade the engine while the rocket is already breaking the atmosphere.

CrowdStrike has deep functional benches - strong Product Marketing, Field, and Demand teams that know how to sell the platform. But there is a conspicuous gap in the middle. The diagnosis here is "politics by spreadsheet." The JD quietly confirms this: you own annual and quarterly planning, KPI frameworks, and ROI dashboards the exact levers organizations reach for when debates outnumber decisions.

Your mandate is to build the "Marketing Operating System" that forces tradeoffs, kills zombie priorities, and stops tool sprawl dead in its tracks. You are the architect of the efficiency they promised Wall Street.

The JD explicitly calls out "M&A integration" and "AI transformation" as core responsibilities. This means you are probably walking into a data integration minefield. You will be the one telling acquired teams their favorite tools are deprecated and telling tenured directors their workflows are obsolete. You are the "bad cop" who enforces the single source of truth.

If Taligence had the brief, we’d be poaching the "Marketing Engineers" from the giants who have survived their own megabloat phases. Look for Ops leaders from Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, or Salesforce... people who have managed budgets that rival the GDPs of small nations. We’d also look at Splunk (now Cisco) veterans who know how to market complex data platforms. You need someone who loves spreadsheets more than creative briefs and isn't afraid to make hard choices to hit an efficiency ratio. I actually believe an outlier candidate could come from a B2B Agency for this one.

CMO Jennifer Johnson creates a distinct culture here. In interviews, she frames marketing as an "Air War" versus a "Ground War," and she is obsessed with efficiency, explicitly stating that every marketing team now has AI agents as part of the structure. If you can walk in and articulate a framework for "Marketing Return on Investment" that accounts for this new AI reality while proving you can treat the budget "like it's your own money," you will speak her language. Pitch a governance model. Show them a 90-day plan that establishes a single source of truth for KPIs and a planning cadence that actually enforces decisions. Tell them you are okay with cold objectivity, stakeholder management and hard conversations about dataflow, and you might just get the keys to the castle.

Another role reporting in to the CMO.

Webflow is the darling of the no-code world, (and we use it for building things here at Taligence) but they have a classic scaling problem: Designers love them, but CIOs don't know them. With a $4 billion series C valuation to justify, the pressure is on to drive real enterprise revenue, not just community love. This reads like a job about crossing the chasm from "cool tool for freelancers" to "mission-critical enterprise platform."

You are selling a "visual dev tool" to a CIO who thinks "no-code" means "security risk." The JD explicitly calls out Analyst Relations and Pricing as core responsibilities - a clear signal they want to move upmarket, get the Gartner stamp of approval, and figure out how to extract enterprise value without alienating the self-serve base. You’re also walking into a massive marketing org (81 people against a 1500 headcount). Just like the role above at Crowdstrike – you will be stopping 81 people from colliding with each other while you centralize strategic control back into PMM.

The marketing-specific hiring data we looked at confirms a dance move from "Vibes" to "Scale." They are hiring marketing talent directly from Shopify and GitLab. This is not a coincidence; CMO Dave Steer is a GitLab alum, and he is bringing in operators who understand "Commerce Scale" and "DevTool Rigor." Meanwhile, they are losing marketers to the AI hype cycle at Anthropic and Jasper.

If Taligence had this recruiting mandate, we’d be poaching from the PLG-to-Enterprise graduates. Look at Figma, Notion, Airtable, or Miro. We need someone who understands "community as a moat" but knows how to arm a sales team to close seven-figure deals with Fortune 500s. We’d also look at Adobe veterans who are tired of the legacy grind and want to move faster.

If you’re a candidate in a hiring process, consider this: CMO Dave Steer believes "features are table stakes; the story wins." He frames marketing with a "Day 2" mindset - meaning launch day is just the start, not the finish line. Don't pitch a flash-in-the-pan campaign. Pitch a narrative architecture. Show him how you’ve used AI not just to generate copy, but to coach the team (he loves using LLMs to roleplay "skeptical buyers"). Prove you can blend Webflow’s creative spark with the enterprise discipline he developed at GitLab, so the product starts being "perfect even when the CIO walks in."

Bubble Skincare is on a tear. They’ve cracked the Gen Z code, expanded into mass retail, and are aggressively poaching talent from legacy giants like Benefit, Clinique, and Estée Lauder.

This is a "dress the bride" role. You are being hired to professionalize a growth machine so that when Unilever or L'Oréal comes knocking, the valuation is astronomical.

The internal org chart reveals a fascinating reality: out of ~38 marketers, Lots are Social Media Managers. Like nearly 40% of the department. There are almost no VP or Director-level titles listed in the top ranks. You are walking into a TikTok Army who know more about algorithms than you do. They don’t need you to create "heat" (they have that); your job is to layer Governance, Clinical Rigor, and Retail Strategy on top of the chaos without killing the vibe.

The salary range ($200k-$300k) is surprisingly low for a NYC-based CMO of a scaling consumer brand. This signals one of two things: either the equity package is life-changing (likely, if an exit is near), or they are looking for a "VP disguised as a CMO." Proceed with caution and negotiate hard on the equity.

We’d hunt for leaders from Drunk Elephant, Sol de Janeiro, or Hero Cosmetics brands that scaled fast via community and exited for massive multiples. You need a leader who can speak "Dermatologist" to the press and "TikTok Trend" to the team.

The JD explicitly obsesses over "Clinical Credibility." This is your angle. The brand has mastered "Emotional Resonance" (vibes), but they are terrified of being dismissed as just another "teen trend." The obituary list is long and provides a cautionary tale of what can happen to “hot” creator-led brands that mistake TikTok views for structural integrity.

Item Beauty, Morphe, and Selfless by Hyram all serve as reminders that if you sell "merch" instead of efficacy, you die when the hype cycle ends. Walk in and show them how you will build the "Science Halo" around the brand. Pitch a strategy that uses their massive social army to amplify clinical claims, not just viral moments. Prove you can make them "Boardroom Legible" for the inevitable acquisition talks.

If you didn’t find anything you especially liked from this list, consider a paid subscription for a mere $9.9 monthly, which nets you access to the entire list of senior marketing opportunities - 348 this go-around (if my counting is right!)

Why is this a superior list of jobs? Well, we scrape employer websites (160K+) in the US and the career sites are more truthful in terms of listing duration. Not only that, but a few jobs don’t make the jump from the corporate portal to Linkedin, Indeed etc, so you may have less competition.

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