Head of Email & Retention Marketing

We're one of the fastest-growing Shopify Retention Agencies in the space, and the brands we work with love us for it. We're at a real inflection point - our team has more than doubled in the last few months. We're looking for someone who's done this before: who can walk into a fast, high-bar, ship-it culture and become the reason quality, margin and retention hold,

Location: Europe. Monthly in-person time in Amsterdam preferred, quarterly acceptable.

Your mission: Own client delivery end to end the work, the people who make it, the capacity behind it, and the client relationships, so that quality, margin and retention hold without the founder in the room.

What you'll do:

1. Own delivery performance and quality across our Retention and Design functions, bringing your own retention marketing expertise to raise the bar on both
2. Lead and develop 3-6 direct reports (Retention Team Leads, Design Lead) and 40+ indirect reports, reporting straight to the founder
3. Own the client relationship and the first escalation point for every account outside the founder's named portfolio - take the hard calls, then coach the resolution back down to the pod so each type of issue only reaches you once
4. Own capacity and resourcing across pods and functions - including a rolling 4-6 week forward view of workload - and resolve cross-pod prioritization conflicts between Retention and Design
5. Own portfolio-level retention and churn, and set and track delivery-wide goals (revenue, retention, quality) in partnership with the founder
6. Own financial planning for delivery: budgeting, forecasting, margin and profitability by account or team
7. Own delivery process, playbooks, and where AI enters the workflow - accountable for hours-per-account falling without the quality bar moving
8. Own senior hiring, co-own the career ladder with People & Culture, and partner with the founder on business strategy as the company scales

What we're looking for (non-negotiable):

1. Email/Retention agency leadership experience: 8+ years leading a delivery or client-services function at an email/retention-focused agency (or similar), having personally driven or been part of scaling a team from ~40 to 70+ people, or ~€3M to €10M+ in revenue.
2. Deep email & retention marketing expertise: you set and raise the bar for the team's work as you know what excellent looks like in this space, not just how to manage people who do it.
3. Client presence under pressure: you can sit in a bad meeting, take responsibility, and keep the account
4. People leadership: you lead and develop leaders, not just individual contributors, and hold them accountable for their own teams
5. Financial acumen: you build and read budgets, forecasts and revenue projections, and understand margin and profitability drivers at the account and team level
6. Operational builder: you spot process or tooling gaps and close them yourself - you can point to systems still in use today that you built, and you use AI tooling concretely in your own work

What you'll get:

1. A seat with real teeth: direct line to the founder, genuine budget authority, and a leadership team you help build rather than inherit
2. Full say over your own team structure: who you hire, how pods are organized, not a structure you inherit and work around
3. The clearest path to COO we can offer (in case you want that)
4. An executive coach and leadership development budget, because we're investing in how you grow, not just what you deliver
5. A team that's already hungry: sharp, fast-moving people who care about the craft, waiting for someone to grow under
6. Competitive salary (range to follow) and generous time off

This is for you if:

• You've been the best retention or delivery leader an agency ever had, and then taught the bar, rather than just holding it yourself
• You want to build a senior team from a young, stretched one, not inherit a finished org
• You're bored by teams that have already figured everything out
• You treat the pull between speed and quality as the actual job, not a problem to escalate away
• You want real ownership of a P&L-adjacent function, with a founder who's ready to hand it over
• You'd rather compete for the hardest problem in the building than coast on the easiest

Speak soon ❤️ 🔥