Marketing Jobs Over $200K

There’s been plenty of talk about employment lately, mostly because the usual headliner, the BLS data, has gone missing. With October’s report cancelled, again, we’ve had to rely on other sources to make sense of what’s actually happening in the job market.

Top of our list? The Challenger report. It tracks company announcements on layoffs and hiring plans and tends to offer a more reliable, consistent view than most.

According to the latest data, layoffs this year have already topped the one-million mark - a level we’ve only seen during serious economic rough patches: the early 2000s, the 2008 crash, and the chaos of 2020.

The sectors taking the hardest hits? Government, Technology, Warehousing, Retail, Services, and Finance. And geographically, it’s the coasts that are catching the brunt, with D.C. leading in year-to-date layoffs with 303,778, followed by California (158,734), New York (81,701), Georgia (78,049), Washington State (77,658), and New Jersey (64,334).

In October, the most commonly cited reasons for layoffs were cost-cutting (50,437), AI-related changes (31,039), economic uncertainty (21,104), and business closures (16,739).

Hiring plans haven’t done much to lift the mood either. This year’s monthly average is the lowest since 2016. Still, October did show a flicker of life, posting the highest hiring figure we’ve seen all year. A sign of recovery - or just a brief reprieve? We’ll see.

When it comes to tracking marketing jobs, we team up with Aspen Technology Labs - the data hounds who monitor over 6 million roles across 150,000 employer sites and ATS systems in 18,000 U.S. cities, all in real time.

This week, they’ve clocked 34,725 marketing job postings live across the country, a modest 0.4% uptick year over year. The broader market may be flatlining, but things are far livelier at the top: 4,647 of those roles are Director level or above, up a solid 10.9% compared to last year.

Pay transparency is also creeping up, with 54% of marketing jobs now listing salary info. For senior marketers, the median salary stands at a healthy $154,991. Across all levels, it lands at $85,280.

Median salary by seniority of marketing role:

• Chief Marketing Officer: $249,995

• SVP/Head of Marketing: $210,496

• VP/Director of Marketing: $164,996

• Marketing Manager: $121,597

• Marketing Specialist: $70,002

Median salary of senior marketing jobs in top hiring cities:

Virgílio Bento didn’t build Sword to flip it. He built it because he spent 12 years watching his brother fight to recover from a car accident. He saw the friction; the travel, the cost, the inaccessibility - and coded it out of existence. Sword is betting the house on "AI-first" care. They have raised ~$400m to prove that an algorithm called Phoenix can replicate the eyes and hands of a therapist.

Whose shoes are these? You are following Michael Krueger, who reportedly drove major revenue growth and valuation increases; so the bar is set at "stratospheric."

The Reality Check: That $633k package? It’s hazard pay. The marketing team is lean (~35 people), and the door revolves fast (50% estimated attrition). Glassdoor paints a brutal picture: a 2.9-star rating and only 41% CEO approval. Reviews cite "unrealistic timelines" and "burnout" as SOP. The only thing keeping people in the building? The product. It actually works, and people are inspired by it. Your job is to rally a tired team around that mission while navigating a leadership culture that clearly runs hot.

What’s the job really about? Enrollments. The mission is noble. The metric is ruthless. The JD is explicit: "your main KPI being enrollments." You have 1,000+ enterprise clients paying for access. Your job is to get their employees to use it. If the seats stay empty, the mission fails.

If Taligence had this recruiting mandate? We’d ID a wartime general with thick skin. We’d be busy hunting B2B2C snipers from Hinge Health (the nemesis), Omada, or Livongo. They need someone who can sell a health benefit like a consumer subscription and stabilize a team that has seen their colleagues exit to competitors like Garner Health and other high-bar marketing houses that live at HashiCorp.

Candidate Tip: Tell Bento you understand the moral imperative to drive enrollments. Every unfilled seat is a person in pain. Ask directly about retention of marketing talent and prove you have the spine to stabilize the ship.

Do not let the ".edu" fool you. This isn't a dusty academic dean role where you debate font choices for the alumni magazine. This is a $480k wartime general role where you are inheriting a machine that is running hot but leaking oil. You are stepping into the shoes of Chuck Trierweiler, whose legacy is a solid B-. He delivered the growth - enrollment is up 8.1% since 2019 and another 2.7% recently…but the bill has come due. The state is eyeing $500M in advertising contracts with skepticism, asking why "20,000 new students" turned into a net gain of only 4,700.

You will be fighting a multi-front war without the luxury of a pause button. The demographic cliff is real; the supply of 18-year-olds is shrinking every year until 2037, and the military, your core feeder - is downsizing its active-duty force to levels not seen since 1940. Even your global footprint is a liability; with 170+ sites abroad, you are marketing "Brand America" in regions where anti-base sentiment and "soft power" struggles can turn a recruitment drive into a diplomatic incident.

To make matters worse, there are digital headwinds; Google’s "helpful content" updates have nuked organic traffic for lead-gen heavy sites, and competitors like Coursera are driving up ad costs to painful levels. You are marketing a "signal" in an era where AI can pass your exams, and you are doing it while the state legislature debates your pension funding.

"Enrollment" is polite-speak for Sales, but your real job is Governance. You have to keep the growth numbers moving up while cleaning up the "sloppy" procurement that earned the previous regime a "D" from auditors. You need to prove that every dollar of that massive budget actually puts a student in a seat. If you can’t defend your ROAS to a legislative committee, you won't last.

If Taligence had the brief, we would skip the Ivy League entirely. We’d hunt subscription giants and EdTech operators who have lived under the microscope, leaders from Audible, Chegg, or 2U. We need someone who views a student as a recurring revenue unit, and who can manage a P&L with the rigor of a CFO. The JD screams for "quantitative modeling" and "enterprise stewardship," so leave the "brand awareness" deck at home. Walk in with a dashboard showing exactly how you optimize a multi-million dollar funnel from click to graduation, and how you will fix the retention leak amidst hellish headwinds.

The "Unicorn in a Graveyard." The food-tech sector is a kill zone. Blue Apron traded at $140 in 2017; today it’s a penny stock. Munchery burned $120M and vanished. CookUnity is the exception. They are profitable and approaching $500M in ARR. They just acquired the Canadian platform Cookin to double down on their A1 grade-positioned "Chef-to-Consumer" model. We reckon this might be a "take us to IPO" job. You are stepping into a high-performance machine delivering 50 million meals a year, reporting directly to CEO Mateo Marietti.

The One Thing: Balance. CookUnity is a marketplace, not a kitchen. You have two customers: the Eaters (demand) and the Chefs (supply). The marketing org explicitly includes "Chef Marketing". Your job is to keep the flywheel spinning..if you lose the chefs, you lose the product. If you lose the eaters, the chefs leave. You need to elevate the brand to "premium" (so people pay more than DoorDash prices) while running a growth machine that fights churn every single week.

If Taligence had the brief: We aren't looking at HelloFresh. We are looking at the Creator Economy. We’d hunt leaders from MasterClass (selling talent as product), Etsy (empowering creators), or Airbnb (managing supply/demand tension). We need someone who understands that the Chef is the brand, not the box.

Candidate Tip: The JD emphasizes "aggressive CAC and LTV goals." Don't just pitch a brand refresh. Pitch a "Chef-First" economy. Show how you will use the chef's own audiences to drive lower CAC, turning them into co-marketers rather than just vendors. And if you speak Spanish, mention it…the company offers a "Personalized Spanish coach" as a perk, hinting at the CEO’s Argentinian roots.

Taco Bell sells "drops." The food is just the medium. You are stepping directly into the shoes of Luis Restrepo, who used this seat to launch the "Cheesy Street Chalupa" before ascending to U.S. CMO in September. You take over the engine room of the most culturally agile brand in QSR. You inherit the "Live Más Live" strategy - the Apple Keynote of fast food. Your mandate is to partner with the test kitchen to create the next "Doritos Locos" and market it like a Supreme hoodie drop.

The team is putting up video game numbers: 11 straight quarters of growth, $1B in operating profit in 2024, and digital sales up 32%. You are responsible for the U.S. marketing calendar for a $17 billion business.

A menu item is just a taco until you make it a moment. Your job is to engineer the drop so it sells out before the paid media even kicks in. While other brands scrub rainbows from their logos to avoid the wrath of the anti-woke brigade, Taco Bell holds the line. YouGov’s 2025 data names them a "brand hero" for LGB diners, noting that the same demographic largely avoids Chick-fil-A. They haven't retreated on Pride content or employee storytelling, proving you can survive the culture war by simply feeding your fans and ignoring the noise.

If Taligence had the brief, we would skip Burger King entirely. We hunt in the "Drop Culture" world - Nike SNKRS, MSCHF, or Liquid Death. We need someone who understands that scarcity and absurdity are features. Global Chief Brand Officer Taylor Montgomery explicitly credits their success to "loosen[ing] our grip" and letting fans drive the brand. Pitch an idea that feels risky. Share when you’d let fans steer the van, or shout instructions from the back seat. Show them how you’d launch a product that only exists on TikTok for 24 hours.

This role is The Truth Architect. If you don't know Miro, it's the visual workspace used by 100 million people to replace the sticky notes on a conference room wall. Ideally, it’s an innovation engine. But let’s be honest: in the wild (like at WPP where I used it), Miro can often turn into a very pretty way of not deciding anything, an inclusive, digital "consensus blanket" rather than a clarity tool.

That is why this role exists. You are reporting into a structure that is pivoting from "centralized support" to a "dedicated, embedded function". Translation: The current data setup isn't telling the whole story. The CMO, Aileen Duplantis, needs someone to fix the plumbing and prove to the CFO that all those pretty boards are actually driving revenue.

The technical bar is high: SQL, dbt, Python/R are mandatory. In this role, you are architecting the "source of truth" for a massive PLG engine that feeds an Enterprise sales motion. The competition in marketing analytics is brutal, and Miro needs someone who can cut through the noise of "vanity metrics" to deliver hard ROI visibility.

If Taligence had the brief, we would hunt in the data teams of Slack, Atlassian, or Dropbox. We need someone who understands the chaotic intersection of product usage data and marketing attribution.

The JD mentions "incrementality testing" and "MMM" explicitly. Don't walk in talking about "last-click attribution." Walk in with a plan to measure lift in a world where cookies are dead and B2B buying journeys are messy and getting more expensive.

We’re seeing a surge in CMO and Head of Marketing roles (many remote) popping up left, right, and centre. If you’ve got your eye on the big chair, here are a few more worth a closer look. Our paid subscribers get exclusive access to our curated list of the highest-paying marketing roles posted in the last 30 days - fresh as a hot Taco😄 

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