A head of growth job description has to answer one question before anything else: what number this person owns. Everything else in the posting follows from the answer, including the title, the band and the shape of the shortlist you get back.
A head of growth is a senior acquisition owner who helps DTC brands grow new customer volume without losing contribution margin. That definition does a lot of work, because it rules out the two candidates most likely to apply to a vague posting: the media buyer who optimizes to platform ROAS, and the marketing generalist who has never been accountable for a margin number.
The template below is written for a consumer brand hiring a growth leader who carries revenue and contribution margin. It is short enough to publish as written.
Below the template are the three decisions that change it. The title alters the scope, the reporting line and the band. So does your revenue stage. So does whether this person manages a team or does the work themselves. Copying the template without making those decisions first produces a posting that attracts candidates at three different levels, and that is the failure our recruiters catch most often at the job description stage.
This is one of a set of ecommerce job description templates we maintain, each with the scope, reporting line and salary band decisions behind it.
Sate the band in the posting. Growth leadership roles listed on our ecommerce jobs board in September 2026 ran from $120k to $140k, the band on both a LATAM or Europe based Head of Growth at a pet health brand and a US remote Director of Growth at a beauty and wellness brand, up to $180k to $250k for a Los Angeles-based Head of Growth at a jewelry brand.
The title sets the scope of the job. Get it wrong and the band and the reporting line follow it into the wrong place.
Constant Hire's head of growth recruitment page publishes four tiers, scoped by direct reports and revenue.
Source: our head of growth recruitment page, September 2026.
That framework covers scoping the role. Our guide on how to hire a head of growth covers running the search, so this template stays on the description.
Note what the tiers leave out. The framework does not scope Director of Growth separately, so there is no published revenue band to copy from it. Our jobs board does carry live Director bands, from $120k to $140k at a beauty and wellness brand up to $200k to $225k at a New York dog products brand, and that is the better reference point if you are leveling a Director role.
Scope a Director description by the two variables the framework actually uses, which are how much the person executes personally and how many people report to them, then set the title to match your internal leveling.
A Director description usually reads like the individual contributor or player-coach tier, with hands-on channel ownership and zero to three reports. Reserve VP language for the third tier, which the same page says fits a brand that already has three to seven people on the growth team. Advertising a VP role before those practitioners exist attracts a manager with nobody to manage, and the page names that as one of the reasons DTC growth searches fail.
Fractional is a side path, not a rung on the ladder. It suits a brand under $10M that needs the function owned two or three days a week before a full-time hire is justified.
Revenue changes the job more than the title does.
Head of growth scope tracks the four tiers above. At $5M to $15M the role is execution with a plan attached, and the person is in the ad account writing briefs and reading the numbers themselves. At $15M to $40M the job splits between doing and managing. Past $40M it becomes management, forecasting and cross-functional negotiation.
Write the description for the stage you are at now, not the one you expect to reach. The published bands move with it, from $130k to $180k at the individual contributor tier up to $240k to $350k plus equity at VP.
Head of growth responsibilities center on acquisition efficiency. The role does not own brand positioning, product roadmap or customer service, though it depends on all of them.
The boundary that causes most trouble is retention, and the two questions get confused. Who executes lifecycle is a team design choice, and putting email and SMS under a retention lead works fine. Who owns the LTV number is not a choice. A head of growth accountable for contribution margin needs the second one, because CAC only makes sense against a repeat rate they can influence. Our screen reflects that: we test for cohort reading and retention fluency even on searches where lifecycle reports elsewhere. State both boundaries in the description. Leaving either ambiguous means the candidate assumes one answer and the founder assumes the other, and the disagreement surfaces during the first bad month.
In LinkedIn's survey of 1,193 US members, responsibilities were the element candidates named most often as helpful in deciding whether to apply, at 90%, just ahead of salary ranges at 89%. The data is self-reported and unweighted, so read it as directional, but the ranking matches what candidates tell our recruiters.
The role that most often sits alongside this one is the creative strategist, and our guide to creative strategist vs creative director covers where those lines fall.
Name the reporting line in the first hundred words. A growth leader reporting to a founder has a different job from one reporting to a CMO, and senior candidates decide whether to apply partly on that basis.
Name the team too, including what does not exist yet. The published tiers run from zero direct reports at the individual contributor level to three to seven at VP, so the number itself signals the altitude. Writing that the role starts with none and builds a team in year two is more attractive than leaving it vague.
Keep the required list to four items or fewer. Every item beyond that shrinks the pool without improving the shortlist.
Required should describe things the person cannot learn in the first quarter, such as owning a paid budget at comparable scale on a consumer brand. Preferred should hold everything else, including channel specifics, category experience and tool familiarity.
The requirements section should never be longer than the accountability section. Candidates read the two differently: responsibilities tell them what the job is, requirements only tell them whether to rule themselves out.
A few standard lines remove strong operators without anyone intending it.
Requiring agency experience excludes people who have only worked in-house, who are often the ones who understand a P&L. Requiring a specific platform certification excludes operators who have run nine figures in ad spend without one. Requiring a degree excludes a large share of the DTC growth talent pool, since much of it came up through performance marketing and paid media, not a marketing program.
Requiring a named vertical is the most expensive of these. Growth mechanics transfer across consumer categories far better than category knowledge transfers across functions.
Keep the band tight while you are at it. Indeed Hiring Lab put the typical US advertised range at about 17% from bottom to top as of April 2023, and wide bands cost you more than precision. A Washington State University study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology tested ranges around $10k wide against ranges $50k or wider and found candidates rated the wide-range employers less trustworthy across all three experiments. If you do need a wide band, the same study found that explaining it by geography helps and explaining it by "depends on qualifications" makes it worse.
The description already contains the interview. Take the number the role owns and ask the candidate how they moved it somewhere comparable, then ask what they would need in the first 90 days to move it here.
The wider diagnosis is that most stalled growth searches are description problems, not market problems. When the title, the scope and the band disagree with each other, the pool arrives mismatched and no interview process recovers it. Deciding the tier first, then writing the description against that decision, is what turns a search into a shortlist.
Scope and management load. Constant Hire's published tiers put a player-coach head of growth with one to three reports at $15M to $40M, and a VP or chief growth officer with three to seven reports at $40M and above. The title should follow the scope rather than lead it.
They should own the LTV number. Whether they also own lifecycle execution is a team design choice, and putting email and SMS under a retention lead works fine. What does not work is leaving either boundary unstated, because the candidate assumes one answer and the founder assumes another, and the disagreement surfaces during the first month when performance dips.
Four or fewer. Required should hold only what someone cannot learn in a quarter, such as owning a comparable paid budget on a consumer brand. Everything else belongs under preferred, where it guides the shortlist without shrinking the pool unnecessarily.
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