Media Buyer / Growth Marketer

Reports to · Director of E-commerce and Performance Marketing
Work model · Full time, fully remote, working hours overlapping EST (New York)
Language · English, Full Professional Proficiency (C1/C2)
Contract · Independent contractor, paid in USD
Compensation · Range starting from USD 2,800 per month (to be defined during the process)
Benefits · 13 PTOs, equipment support, annual review, tooling provisioning (policies to be aligned)

About the Company

This is a confidential search run by Combine Global Recruitment. The company is a privately held American consumer goods group, founded over a decade ago, with around 200 people. It designs, manufactures and sells its own products, with no outside investors, which means growth decisions are made in house and shipped fast.

Two direct-to-consumer hardware brands sit inside this role, with close to identical operations. Both sell physical products with real repeat potential, backed by long warranties and generous return windows.

Profit is the language of this function. The question asked of any media investment here is how much came back as margin, not how much came back as impressions.

The company name and the brands are shared with candidates in the first conversation.

About the Opportunity

Why this role exists

The company produces more than 1,500 creative assets a week, between an internal team and a TikTok operation, and that volume keeps climbing. Someone has to decide what gets spend behind it, what gets cut, and what that money is buying in margin.

You inherit a working machine. The accounts run, Northbeam is implemented and calibrated, the funnel exists and sells.

What isn't happening is growth. Spend doesn't grow, creative gets produced faster than it gets deployed, new channels stay closed, and the post-click side of the funnel goes unoptimized. What's missing is the person who looks across all of it and brings the next thesis without being asked.

The mandate

Grow media investment on our own brands while holding or improving MER. Not volume for volume, not efficiency for efficiency. Volume that produces profit.

MER for this seat is measured on DTC only. Amazon and retail stay out of your number. Alongside it, you're read on acquisition gross profit and on profit per landing page visitor.

How the work splits

Running the accounts takes around 20% of the week. Not because it matters less, but because AI and automation made it faster to do well. That freed up the rest of the seat for the part most paid media roles never include: offers, pricing, landing pages, funnel and new channels.

The 20% (running the accounts)

• Ownership of the paid media accounts, with Meta as the main channel · Account structure, attribution, budgets, pacing, audiences, exclusions, and the call on what scales and how. You'll build and maintain that structure yourself day to day. There is no agency behind you and nothing is outsourced.

The 80% (growth)

• Open channels beyond Meta, starting with YouTube · Meta carries the large majority of spend today and the company knows it is over-concentrated. YouTube is the declared medium-term priority. AppLovin already runs at a small share of spend and has never been made to work at scale, which makes it a fixable problem rather than a blank page. X and Pinterest are tests.

• Own the post-click · Hypothesis, variant and read on landing page tests, with conversion and AOV as the target, plus the upsell flow. The operation ships three to four new pages a week, six counting tests, and goes from idea to live in three days when it's a priority. What isn't built yet is the process around it: you'd be shaping how testing works here while already delivering on it.

• Propose offers and pricing structure · This is a place where the offer actually moves. A recent example: free shipping above a cart threshold was replaced by a free product above the same threshold, which shifts inventory of a strong item and raises the odds of a second purchase. Tests like that are routine here, not exceptions. Offer and pricing calls currently sit with the Director of E-commerce. You start by proposing, and autonomy grows with track record.

• Expand internationally inside Meta · Global campaigns already drive a meaningful share of revenue, largely through incidental reach. Finding the underserved countries inside those campaigns and building deliberate structure for them is open ground. There are no localized pages or currency adaptation today, and that sits with another team on a medium-term roadmap.

• Build the media plan for launches and sales events, including BFCM · How many ads, when, pointed at which pages, with a scaling plan for each window.

• Feed signal back to creative · You are the first person to see which of the 1,500 assets is working. That read has to reach the creative team and the TikTok team the same day, not in the Monday meeting.

What to expect

• Not an execution seat with a task queue · Nobody arrives with the list of what to test. The thesis is yours.

• A single seat with wide interfaces · No peers in the same function and no reports, by design. In exchange you work directly with the internal creative team, the TikTok team, the video ad lead, the e-commerce project manager and the art director.

• Every dollar here is judged on profit · Institutional campaigns, awareness work and brand budgets are a different craft, and that experience doesn't transfer to what this seat is measured on.

About What We Are Looking For

Strategy and execution belong to the same person here. Having led a team is welcome, as long as you were still the one inside the platform.

Must-Have Requirements (Each requirement below is here for a reason, and the reason is stated)

• Bought media on Meta for DTC e-commerce for 3+ years, on accounts spending more than USD 150,000/month.

  • You built and maintained the campaign structure with your own hands. Agency and in-house backgrounds both qualify. There is nobody above or beside you to teach the fundamentals, the account already runs well past that level, and year-end peaks multiply it.

• Scaled an account, not only kept one running.

  • You took an operation from X to 3X, you have the numbers from before and after, and you can explain what specifically you did to cause it. Spend here is on a growth curve, and the seat is measured on what gets added, not on what gets held.

• Made daily media decisions against unit economics: contribution margin, break-even ROAS, MER, AOV and CAC.

  • The core KPIs here are MER and acquisition gross profit. Media decisions are made against margin, not against platform metrics.

• Worked with attribution beyond platform reporting, on Northbeam or equivalent.

  • The company runs Northbeam alongside platform data, with targets calibrated against both.

• Ran landing page and funnel A/B tests, from hypothesis to read.

  • Form the hypothesis, define the variant, read the result, make the call. Several new pages ship every week and this side of the funnel comes with the seat.

• Used AI inside the daily media buying workflow.

  • The company wants someone who uses AI to think better and decide faster: good prompting, good judgment about what comes back, and better decisions because of it. Building AI systems, integrations or agents is handled internally, so that side is not part of this seat.

Nice-to-Have (None of these is a dealbreaker)

• Scaled YouTube to six figures per month in DTC.

  • The most valuable item on this list. YouTube is the declared next channel on the plan.

• Scaled AppLovin, X or Pinterest to real volume.

  • AppLovin already runs at a small share of spend and has never worked at scale. X and Pinterest are untested.

• Grew spend across consecutive months, not in one strong quarter.

  • Spend here steps up month over month and multiplies at year end.

• Expanded internationally through global campaign structures.

  • Global campaigns already drive a meaningful share of revenue, largely through incidental reach. Cutting country groups and building for underserved markets is open ground.

• Shaped creative angles and briefs, not only read the results.

  • Creative is produced in house. A shorter loop with the creative team is worth a lot, though this is lower priority.

• Ran incrementality tests.

  • The company has run one and wants to return to the practice as spend justifies.

• Worked with mature async operating habits.

  • Things get resolved in Slack here, and standing check-in calls are the exception.

About the Hiring Process

1. Combine Screening (45 min) with João Benedetto, recruiter at Combine.

   • Covers: background, scale story and numbers, expectations on both sides.

2. Technical and culture (45 min) with the Director of E-commerce and Performance Marketing, and HR.

   • Covers: how you run an account, how you build a growth thesis, and how you work with a small team.

3. Final panel (1 hour) with the Chief of Staff, the CEO and the Director of E-commerce and Performance Marketing.

   • Covers: mostly behavioral. Ownership, communication and decision making.