Marketing hiring is firmly back on the move.

There are 38,268 live marketing roles across the US this week, that’s an increase of more than 6,000 roles since the start of the year, a clear sign that demand has picked up pace as we head into Q1’s closing stretch. Year over year, it shows a 2.2% growth.

Of those openings, 4,982 sit at Director-level and above, which we classify as senior marketing roles. That segment has grown 9% year on year, suggesting companies are still investing in leadership.

60% of postings include salary information. The median salary across all marketing roles currently stands at $90,002, while senior positions command a median of $155,002.

Median Salary By Seniority

The momentum is playing out across sectors. Here are some examples:

JPMorgan has ramped up marketing recruitment since Q4, reaching new highs in February, with senior roles spread across New York, Delaware, Ohio, Texas, and Massachusetts.

Walmart doubled hiring in December and has maintained elevated levels since, with senior positions largely based in New Jersey and Arkansas.

Intuit’s marketing hiring has been climbing steadily since mid-last year, with another recent spike: senior roles primarily in California, with occasional openings in Georgia.

AI remains a particularly active pocket. Nvidia continues expanding its marketing team in Santa Clara. OpenAI has doubled the number of roles posted in January, hiring across New York, California, and London. Anthropic has also accelerated in recent weeks, adding roles in California, London and New York.

Amazon, meanwhile, appears to have scaled back from the hiring surge seen last spring.

The key question now is whether this momentum carries into Q2, or slows, as it did last year. For the moment, the market looks steady, and senior marketers in particular have reason to pay attention.

Let’s start with a picture: just days ago, at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Prime Minister Modi asked 13 global tech leaders to join hands for a "unity pose." While everyone else complied, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei - standing side by side, pointedly avoided holding hands, eventually settling for a tense, awkward fist-bump that instantly went viral. Commentators called it an "AI Cold War" moment, but for anyone watching the marketing space over the last month, the tension traced straight back to this kind of role.

A few weeks earlier, Anthropic landed a strategic blow during the Super Bowl. Their satirical spots skewered “manipulative chatbots” shoving products into conversations and planted a simple flag: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.” That campaign turned OpenAI’s monetization roadmap into a narrative liability and drew Sam Altman into a public, defensive response that extended the earned‑media cycle. Among insiders, the consensus was simple: Anthropic controlled the frame. And they’re surfing a broader moment too, cast as the company willing to say no to Pete Hegseth’s defense establishment rather than play the obedient contractor (but that’s a story for another time)

Underneath the theatrics is a harsh economic reality. OpenAI spends huge sums on computing power, and those costs rise as usage grows. Subscriptions and API fees help, but they are limited by how much people and companies are willing to pay. With hundreds of millions of users asking constant questions, even a tiny cost per answer stacks up to many billions a year, even before training, research, and salaries. Subscriptions and API revenue cannot carry that load forever, so OpenAI has to find ways to monetize the decisions it helps people make.

That is the backdrop for this job. “Monetization Product Marketing Manager, Advertising” sounds mid-level, but the compensation band, $374K to $415K in base plus generous equity, signals a flat internal leveling system and very high revenue expectations tied to this seat. The remit reads less like a classic PMM and more like the go‑to‑market architect for a multi‑billion‑dollar monetization pillar. The description asks for deep understanding of the advertising ecosystem; measurement, targeting and relevance, creative, auctions, performance tradeoffs - while also placing you in the blast radius of “safety, policy, trust” and long‑term brand risk.

The core challenge is trust. People use ChatGPT expecting answers based on reasoning, not on who paid. If they start to suspect that suggestions are sponsored, it begins to feel like a search engine with nicer language. Once doubt sets in, it is very hard to win back credibility. Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads have already planted skepticism about AI that mixes answers and ads. A bad ad format would damage the sense that the system is neutral.

If Taligence were running this search, we wouldn’t just fish in the usual Google Ads or Meta ponds. We’d look for people who’ve worked in systems where money follows real transactions, not just eyeballs. Think leaders from Amazon’s ads and commerce teams or builders from Uber Ads, people who know how to plug revenue into moments when users are already ready to buy, book, or transact, so the paid layer feels like a natural part of the product.

If you walk into this interview in San Francisco, frame your pitch around monetizing outcomes (instead of surfaces) without breaking the spell. Talk about agent execution fees, where a request like “Help me book a flight” routes through an ecosystem of partners and OpenAI softly takes a cut on completed transactions. Explore embedded commerce, referrals, and marketplaces that harness the assistant’s role as orchestrator without turning every answer into inventory. Go into the interview knowing Anthropic already turned “ad‑soaked AI” into a punchline. Ask OpenAI where they refuse to cross the line on paid influence in answers, and then show them how you’ll fund the business without handing Anthropic the script for its next Super Bowl joke.

Axon is synonymous with Tasers, body cameras, and law enforcement. Look closely at the target audience for this new enterprise push: Retail, Healthcare, Logistics, Critical Infrastructure, and Data Centers. Selling government‑grade surveillance tech into risk‑averse corporate C‑suites means inheriting a lot of PR baggage and public scrutiny. You are taking a brand anchored in policing and trying to make it acceptable to a hospital administrator or a retail executive.

The compensation ceiling is a staggering $429,600 base. But please read the fine print. You get exactly four direct reports. Following the prevailing trend for marketing leadership roles we called out in our 2025 report, this JD also calls for a “player‑coach” who will “personally roll up your sleeves to build, execute, and optimize enterprise demand programs,” plus a strict four‑day‑a‑week return‑to‑office mandate in Boston (Tuesday through Friday). Put together, the underlying reality comes into focus.

By our read, attrition in Axon’s marketing team is hovering near 30%. A revolving door at that speed suggests many of the mid‑level executors may well have already left. You are being offered a top‑of‑market base salary to operate as a senior director of demand-gen wrapped in a VP title. That comp band reads like hazard pay for a demanding, heavily regulated, in‑office meat grinder.

If Taligence had this search: we normally predict where we’d hunt for talent. Here, the playbook is evident already. We initially flagged Samsara and Motorola Solutions as ideal hunting grounds for marketers who know how to sell physical sensors and cameras to corporate America. A quick scan of LinkedIn proved the thesis: Axon has already imported straight from those companies earlier in 2025. Axon is importing the Samsara GTM engine wholesale to build a new tiger team, and the ~30% attrition could be the friction of the old guard clashing with the new regime.

If you step into this interview loop, come prepared for a grueling, hands‑on mandate. Bring a highly tactical plan for translating law enforcement infrastructure into corporate risk management without stepping on cultural landmines. Ask direct questions about the marketing department’s turnover rate and exactly what resources are left to support your campaigns. Prepare to grind in the office four days a week, and make absolutely certain that massive base salary clears your personal threshold for a wartime tour of duty…inside a brand that still reads as “police tech” to much of the public.

While the “Taser” role at Axon is all rhino-hide and hazard pay, this CMO seat at Smalls is the quintessential “DTC darling” dream, with a 2026 survivalist twist. Smalls started life as a built‑for‑subscription cat food startup and is now pushing hard to become a true multi‑channel brand. With retail now in hundreds of pet stores nationwide and the recent hire of COO Nate Kredich (who helped scale The Honest Kitchen and Himalayan Pet Supply), the mission is clear: break past the digital plateau and build a durable retail engine, or stall out.

The most refreshing part of this JD is its structural honesty. It makes a rare, explicit distinction between the CMO and CBO (co‑founder Veronica del Rosario). The CBO owns the “soul”- brand meaning, creative, narrative. This CMO owns the “engine” - revenue, demand gen, CRO, and the digital product roadmap. By stripping out the gray areas that usually fuel marketing turf wars, Smalls is handing the CMO real autonomy over top‑line revenue. It’s simple. You’ll be the primary architect of the growth engine, using a remote‑first culture (and, per the listing, a four‑day work week if that holds) to attract and motivate a high‑performance team.

If Taligence had this search, we’d go hunting for the “Growth Hacker 2.0.” We’d skip the classic brand stewards at legacy CPG and start at places like The Farmer’s Dog, to find leaders who’ve lived the fresh‑to‑frozen supply chain and know how to move from DTC to retail shelf. We’d look at Liquid Death alumni who understand how to keep a cult‑like, weird brand intact while scaling into national distribution. And we’d tap talent from Whoop who are bored with B2B or fitness and want to bring aggressive experimentation loops into a high‑affinity consumer category like pet health.

If you talk more about storytelling than you do about conversion rate optimization or CAC/LTV by channel, you’ll lose the room. The founders come out of high‑growth, digital product‑driven environments; they speak in growth loops, cohorts, and roadmaps. You should show up with a clear plan for how you’ll win when Smalls is sitting in a physical freezer at retail, not just how you’ll buy more Facebook ads. And if you aren’t genuinely a cat person, purrlease don’t fake it. Smalls has built its magic on fully embracing cat weirdness…and this team will smell performative enthusiasm a mile away.

Wait, haven’t we seen this before?

Yes. Yes, we have. Almost exactly a year ago, we featured this same role on the Ladder, praising their $40M Series B, headcount expansion, remote-first culture, and impressive tech stack. The outgoing SVP took the seat and, to be fair to her, ran a highly competent, sophisticated enterprise playbook. Over the last year, Hyperproof dominated RSAC with street ads around Moscone, reset the narrative around AI, integrated the Expent.ai acquisition to expand into third-party risk, and pushed out heavy benchmark research. We’d give the last 12 months of Hyperproof’s marketing a solid 7.5/10

And yet, just over a year later, she’s out and the seat is open again. Why? Because you cannot out-market a structural squeeze, and you certainly cannot do it with a leaking bucket.

The JD asks you to “become a beacon of our unique and treasured culture.” But a quick peek behind the curtain suggests a company under strain. Headcount sits in the 51–200 band and is down meaningfully year-over-year. Looking at LinkedIn, attrition appears extremely high (higher still in marketing) in an economy where most people are white-knuckling their desks. The marketing team has steadily walked out to places like Userflow and Oversight. Glassdoor reviews describe a surprise layoff the Monday after Thanksgiving, leadership pulling the rug on near-completed projects, and some even use words like “cult.”

This brings us to the Real Mandate. Buried in the application flow is a checkbox: “I have experience scaling a SaaS organization from $20M in revenue to $75M+ in revenue.” They want you to nearly quadruple the business.

The problem: Hyperproof is fighting a brutal two-front war in a saturated GRC market. Looking up, they want to sell enterprise multi-framework governance, but they’re running headfirst into OneTrust (dominant market share) and AuditBoard (estimated $300M+ ARR peers in the segment). Looking down, they’re trying to capture the mid-market, but Vanta and Drata are soaking up mindshare, reviews, and user adoption with faster, lighter compliance automation. Hyperproof is squeezed in the middle. Their messaging over the last year… “AI-powered,” “human-in-the-loop,” “trust” - is table stakes. It is what everyone else is saying.

And how will you execute this $20M-to-$75M leap? The JD says you’ll report to the CEO, but you’ll also “take ownership of marketing operations… hands-on in managing lead flow, routing, and workflows” and must have “in-depth knowledge” of HubSpot. Translation: the MOPs function is thin or gone, and you are expected to be both the wartime general charting GTM and the plumber fixing lead routing on a Tuesday night!

The salary? $250K–$275K in base - the same band they posted a year ago, despite losing a year of momentum. (They do, however, offer a year of free diapers and wipes. Credit where it’s due: that is a genuinely great perk.)

If Taligence had this search, we’d be hunting for a turnaround specialist or challenger-brand expert who knows how to punch out of the squeezed middle. We’d tap leaders from LogicGate, Secureframe, or adjacent infra players like Axonius - people who have already weaponized a sharp, specific wedge against better-funded competitors.

If you step into this five-stage interview loop, do not pitch generic “AI-powered trust.” Pitch a hard-edged competitive claim. They need a “Why Hyperproof and never Vanta or OneTrust” story. Ask the CEO directly about the Thanksgiving layoffs, the attrition, and what budget and runway you actually have to hit that $75M ARR goal. And negotiate heavy equity, because the base salary does not match the operational and strategic weight of this rescue mission.

If you’re actively on the hunt, here are a few roles well worth your attention: