Marketing Jobs Over $200K

How’s the job market shaping up in Q2 2025? We’ve spent the week digging into the latest data from our friends at Aspen Technology Labs, and let’s just say - it’s telling tales.

We’ll be serving the full U.S. Marketing Jobs Report next week (save room), but here’s a little amuse-bouche: the market has eased off the accelerator since Q1. Entry- and Associate-level roles have taken the biggest hit, while senior positions, at the Director level and above, are proving more resilient. CMOs, in particular, are still in high demand.

Hiring has slowed overall. Roles are staying open longer, but salary transparency continues to improve - a trend we’re more than happy to see.

As of this week, there are 33,451 client-side marketing roles on the market in the U.S., marking a 3.4% increase year-over-year. Of those, 4,204 are senior roles (director-level and above), up 4.4% from last year.

More than half (55.3%) of senior listings include salary details. Median compensation for senior roles now sits at $150,010, while the overall median for all marketing positions is $84,240. Here’s how it breaks down by seniority:

• CMO: $285,002

• SVP/Head of Marketing: $199,992

• VP/Director: $163,197

• Marketing Manager: $115,003

• Marketing Specialist: $72,498

Median salary of senior marketing jobs in major U.S. cities

Seattle continues to stand out, thanks to Amazon’s ongoing hiring spree. The company’s added 32 senior-level marketing openings in the past month across Kindle, Prime Video, Fire TV, and other divisions. Meanwhile, the hunt for a CMO at Karbon rolls on, and another plum CMO seat just hit the market - we’ll spill the tea inside.

Also in this edition: a power quartet of new senior gigs at The Washington Post, FX, Plume, and Sierra Space. Think ad yield, brand rehab, SaaS acceleration, and orbital ambition. All four roles pay north of $200K, and none of them are backfills - these are fresh strategic plays.

And before anyone asks: no, these aren’t our roles. We’re not the matchmakers, employers, or agents - just professionally nosy 🕵️

FX sits on the knife-edge where boutique storytelling meets Disney’s wider agenda. John Landgraf still rules the creative hill after twenty-one years, but longtime publicity chief John Solberg is stepping down, leaving a gap the size of a trade-press thunderstorm. I’m not dramatizing things by saying that the network’s future hinges on who commands that flank.

Enter the SVP of Public Relations - the job looks tactical on paper, yet feels closer to joint-chief status. You will brief Landgraf and the Disney brass before dawn, neutralize an overnight leak by lunch, and drop a clean pull quote into Variety before the West Coast wrap. Every appearance, memo, and eyebrow raise must carry C-suite calm. Your presence in the boardroom will tell investors whether FX can still outclass HBO and Apple TV+ without the headcount it once enjoyed.

The remit straddles Hulu, Disney+, and the linear channels. You will stitch consumer buzz to trade narrative, choreograph awards season while budgets tighten, and defend FX’s “grad-school for writers” aura as Disney’s cost cuts graze the edges. Success means proving that a leaner team can still turn each launch - The Bear, Shōgun, whatever is next - into a pop-culture moment that echoes on Wall Street calls.

Compensation up to $457,000 shows Disney wants gravity, not training wheels. Bring a contact book that blends Hollywood, Capitol Hill, and Silicon Valley, plus the composure to coach executives whose words can swing a stock chart in any direction!

If Taligence had this recruiting assignment, we would hire from HBO or Netflix or top SVP + EVP-level practitioners from top PR shops focused fully on entertainment.

It’s not easy to research what’s going on at WAPO. Just try Googling news about a news publisher and you get... well, news. Although most of us know this Bezos-owned publication, what’s happening under the hood here?

The Washington Post is shrinking fast. Similarweb clocks 72.2 million monthly visitors, down 24% in a year (other sources have it at 54m) and 1/6 of the Times’s readers. Red ink crossed $100 million in 2024 as ad sales slipped and subscriptions fell.

 Jeff Bezos once told the newsroom

Last spring, he sounded sterner

That pressure now rests on one role. The Senior Director of Advertising Monetization reports to the CTO, runs both ad-product managers and engineers, and must lift yield while the funnel shrinks. Tools on hand: Beacon Guard, Smart Pitch, the Convergence Network, which promise privacy-conscious targeting. Pay peaks at $368K; the office rule is five days on-site in D.C. or New York.

Culture could trip up even the best operator. Glassdoor shows a 3.3 rating and only 39% of reviewers would recommend the Post. Oooff. Staff attrition hovers near 11%, and morale took another hit when Opinion pivoted toward “personal liberties and free markets,” costing 250K subscribers in a week. Watford’s arrival as Chief Strategy Officer adds air cover, but day-to-day buy-in must come from editors who may fear more political contortions.

If I were filling this seat as Taligence, I’d poach from pubs that already balance data science and editorial guardrails, say, the Times’ first-party ads team, Vox’s Concert marketplace, or Spotify’s Audience Network. My screening lens would be simple:

• Revenue per unique – show one past climb when audience was flat

• Brand-safety diplomacy – name an incident you defused without killing yield

• Dev-bench rapport – how do you become true pals with coders

If you’re interviewing, explain how you’d map the WAPO funnel, tighten frequency caps, and pitch a 90-day pilot for context-matched video. Oh, and watch out for creepy 3^rd parties present in the interview loop, we read some weird stuff on Glassdoor.

Nail this role, and you give Bezos a proof point that code, not cuts, can close the gap. Miss, and the Times keeps lapping while the ledger bleeds deeper red.

Imagine your home Wi-Fi is like a school hallway during class change: everyone (phones, laptops, smart bulbs, game consoles) rushes to the nearest door (router) at the same time, so some doorways get clogged while others stay clear.

Plume is the smart hall monitor.

Over 400 Internet providers worldwide now use Plume, covering tens of millions of homes and more than a billion connected devices. For customers, Wi-Fi just feels smoother. For providers, it means happier users and fewer “my Internet is broken!” panic-stricken phone calls.

Plume’s last CMO, Valerie Buckingham (ex-Microsoft, Paolo Alto Networks) stepped back into an advisory role in August 2024 and left the company completely in January of 2025.

My read on this role? Plume needs a VP with a clear B2B track record who can turn cloud jargon into clear numbers that show ISPs how features lift ARPU.

This leader builds and updates co-branded decks, emails, landing pages, and in-app prompts that 400+ partners rely on each quarter. They run the GTM engine; owning calendars, HubSpot/SFDC hygiene, and closed-loop metrics. With ABM focus, they chase a few Tier-1 carriers, while funnelling frontline feedback to product, so the roadmap stays on target.

Selling to ISPs is unforgiving work, trust me, I have done it. They are mostly unimaginative, low-margin commodity businesses that move slowly and decide by committee.

If Taligence had this recruiting assignment (and it’s right in our wheelhouse) we would be looking at leaders who built and launched premium Wi-Fi or cybersecurity add-ons on the Operator side at places like Comcast, who would bring instant credibility and inside contacts, or Cloud-Managed Networking Leaders such as Cisco Meraki, Aruba, and Fortinet - who know ABM + channel motions inside out and pair product storytelling with airtight ops discipline.

Be aware, Plume’s headcount (per LinkedIn) declined 19% y/y, and they have a high rate of attrition, arguably worse than the most gruelling of ad agency sweatshops. Although the management team has great on-paper credentials, Glassdoor grades the company at 3.2/5.0 and only half of reviewers would recommend Plume as a great place to work.

If you can fuse Netflix-level storytelling with operator-grade margin math, you might be the marketer who can turn Plume’s cloud magic into real ISP revenue.

In our last issue, we watched Lincoln Centre try to widen its audience in Manhattan; Seattle now faces a similar moment. The Space Needle, a 605-foot tower first opened for the 1962 World’s Fair, and the adjacent Chihuly Garden and Glass have opened a search for a Chief Marketing Officer after Randy Coté resigned in June. Coté rose from seasonal elevator operator to CMO and left a visible mark - his LinkedIn farewell framed the exit as “bittersweet” after nearly twenty years of service. 

Coté’s tenure proves what smart marketing can do for these attractions. He put Alaska Airlines on New Year’s at the Needle, turning the midnight drone-and-fireworks show into live TV for the entire Pacific time zone, and he handed media buying to PB&, a nimble Seattle agency brought in to sharpen digital reach. 

The next CMO inherits those gains but must level out seasonal swings and raise per-guest revenue without resorting to endless discounts. Dynamic pricing, precise segmentation, and real-time demand signals will matter more than new souvenir SKUs.

Dale Chihuly’s glass may sit in museums worldwide, yet on the Seattle Center campus many guests still treat his gallery as a side trip. The Space Needle draws “more than a million visitors per year,” while the garden and glasshouse were first budgeted for roughly 400,000 annual guests, less than half that flow through. Even the Needle’s own ticket page lists the gallery as an “add-on” in a combo bundle, cueing visitors to start with the tower and tack on the art if time allows.

Your task is to change that habit: sell the glasshouse as a stand-alone art stop while keeping the path smooth for anyone who wants both attractions on one ticket. Partnerships with art schools, auction houses, and airline loyalty programs can add credibility and pull fresh audiences beyond the Northwest. Inside the operation, marketing, ticketing, and guest services still work from different dashboards. Link point-of-sale, CRM, and web data so price tweaks flow straight to staffing and line management. The board will watch closely. The role pays $200,000-$250,000 plus up to a 30% bonus, and impact has to show.

If Taligence had this assignment, we would start with tapping leaders from MoMA tourism partnerships and Disney Parks revenue management - people fluent in art-first storytelling and high-throughput attendance economics.

If we keep the search more local, our first calls go to the Seattle Art Museum, Woodland Park Zoo, and the Museum of Pop Culture. All three know how to turn cultural appeal into steady, year-round visits. Next, we would tap Visit Seattle and the Alaska Airlines loyalty team. They live on smart pricing and shoulder-season demand.

We look forward to covering more destination-marketing CMO jobs in future editions.

Another company with Space in the title that caught our eye is Sierra Space. CMO Ladder is bullish on Space companies and here’s why: this industry is projected to reach $1.8 trillion by 2035, according to McKinsey.

Sierra Space is only four years old, yet its origin story stretches back to a Reno garage in 1994, when Turkish-American engineers Eren and Fatih Ozmen bought a 20-person avionics shop and grew it into the $4 billion Sierra Nevada Corporation. They spun Sierra Space out in 2021 to lure outside capital, then promptly raised a record-setting $1.7 billion (Series A and B combined) at a $5.3 billion valuation to bankroll the Dream Chaser fleet and Orbital Reef plans.

For the non-space geeks out there, the Dream Chaser is a downsized, 21st-century space shuttle. It’s a winged spacecraft that launches on a rocket but glides back to an ordinary runway at barely-roller-coaster forces. Sierra Space isn’t stopping at a single vehicle: they’re assembling a fleet - multiple Dream Chasers that can fly frequent, airline-style runs. The first craft, Tenacity, is due to start NASA cargo deliveries to the International Space Station, with later versions stretched to carry up to 7 passengers.

But taxis are pointless without somewhere to go. Orbital Reef is Sierra Space’s joint venture with Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin: a commercial space station designed as a “mixed-use business park” in low-Earth orbit. Picture a modular complex of roomy, inflatable habitats where researchers, manufacturers, tourists and even film crews can rent office space, just 400km above Earth. NASA is co-funding early design work as it looks for replacements for the ageing ISS, and recent milestones show the project is moving from PowerPoint to hardware testing. The partners aim to have the station open for business late this decade, and Dream Chaser is slated as one of its shuttle services.

Per Reuters, CEO Tom Vice retired in January 2025, so founder Fatih Ozmen is acting chief while the board hunts an IPO-season leader, and former Boeing finance head Troy Lahr minds the money.

Tenacity, the first Dream Chaser spaceplane, now sits at Cape Canaveral for fit checks ahead of a late-2025 ISS cargo flight. A smooth debut could place Sierra Space beside SpaceX (which is close to a $400bn valuation); however, a slip could send it back to the slide deck.

Sierra Space Brand chief Matthew Clarke, hired in 2022 after spells at Aston Martin and Jaguar Land Rover, claims he lifted brand awareness 270% and snagged Fast Company’s 2023 “Brands That Matter” honor. He leads a scattered, agency-heavy team and needs a hands-on deputy to keep the story sharp while he works the stage. That is the Director of Strategic Marketing & Comms' brief: control the chatter, feed proof points, and keep investors, engineers, and media flying in close formation.

Become a paying subscriber of Premium to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content.

Already a paying subscriber? Sign In.

A subscription gets you:

• • Access to all the movers in a downloadable format
• • Hand picked curated listings of $200K jobs in marketing
• • No annoying ads