Head of Customer Referral & Emerging Channels

Responsibilities

• Manage and develop the growth marketing team, setting clear goals, providing coaching, and fostering a culture of accountability and innovation.
• Own and evolve Gusto's customer referral program from strategy and incentive design, to measurement and optimization, driving meaningful new customer acquisition and revenue through word-of-mouth and network effects.
• Build and run a rigorous experimentation roadmap, using advanced testing and data analysis to identify growth levers and scale what works.
• Scout, pilot, and scale emerging acquisition channels, bringing rigor to what gets tested and moving quickly from hypothesis to results.
• Partner with the Web Marketing team to surface and prioritize conversion experiments, translating referral and emerging channel performance data into landing page hypotheses and post-click optimizations that improve acquisition outcomes.
• Partner cross-functionally with Growth, Product, Sales, RevOps, and Data teams to align growth programs with business priorities and optimize the full funnel from awareness to activation.
• Use AI tools as a consistent, habitual part of your workflow, generating referral program briefs, developing incentive copy variants, accelerating channel research, and building reusable systems that scale best practices across the team.
• Report on program performance to senior leadership, distilling complex data into clear insights and concrete recommendations.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in growth marketing, demand generation, or performance marketing, with at least 3 years in a people management role.
• Demonstrated success building and scaling customer acquisition programs (referral, affiliate, and/or word-of-mouth) from concept to measurable growth.
• Working knowledge of paid acquisition channels (SEM, paid social, ABM, etc.) and a strong grasp of full-funnel growth strategy.
• Strong analytical skills with the ability to translate data into decisions; experience with tools like Salesforce, Amplitude, redash, or similar platforms is a plus.
• AI-fluent in practice, not just in theory; you use AI tools consistently in your day-to-day workflow to accelerate briefs, copy, program design, and analysis, and you're building toward systematizing those habits for your team.
• Exceptional communicator who can influence across teams and present clearly to executive audiences.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience; MBA or quantitative background is a plus.

Compensation

Cash compensation ranges from $141,000 to $176,000/yr in Denver, Phoenix/Scottsdale, Las Vegas, and Atlanta, and $166,000 to $207,000/yr in San Francisco and New York.