Head of SMB Affiliate Marketing

 

Change the way the world travels

Join the GetYourGuide journey to connect people with unforgettable travel experiences around the world. Millions look to us for unique activities they can trust, and it’s all powered by our commitment to make every single journey extraordinary - including yours. 

Ready to unlock your potential with a community of fellow explorers? Find your next role at our Berlin HQ or one of our local offices around the globe, from New York to Bangkok. Head to getyourguide.careers to take the first step.

 

Teams Mission

GetYourGuide's Partnerships organization builds incremental, profitable demand through a portfolio of partner channels spanning enterprise distribution and scalable growth programs. This role leads the Growth Channels team, responsible for three channels that share a common motion: scalable, economics-driven partner acquisition and activation at volume.

Those channels are affiliate networks, travel agents, longtail publishers, and affilaites, and gift cards. They sit in the same team because they run on the same operating logic: programmatic or SMB-style partner acquisition, rigorous commission and deal mechanics, lifecycle activation from sign-up to first transaction, and a continuous loop of optimization against ROAS and incrementality targets. Where our Enterprise team runs bespoke BD and deep technical integrations with OTAs, banks, and airlines, Growth Channels runs playbooks — built to scale.

Your mission

Six things you'll own:

1. Portfolio strategy and channel economics. Define what each of the three channels is for, where it competes, and what economics justify investment. Allocate budget, commissions, time, and headcount against profitable growth (GMV, NR, ROAS targets). Own the partner pipeline and prioritization across all three channels. Decide quickly what to scale and what to park.
2. Scale affiliate networks with incrementality discipline. Structure deals — commission tiers, caps, bonuses, placements — and run campaigns end-to-end. Prove what's incremental vs. last-click noise and restructure economics accordingly. Tighten governance (SEM policy, coupon leakage, fraud, brand safety) without slowing down what works.
3. Build Travel Agents into a real growth bet. This is the team's highest-upside acquisition play. Build the SMB-style partner acquisition motion end-to-end — referral, organic/SEO, SaaS marketplaces, community channels — and the lifecycle stack that pulls partners from sign-up to first booking and keeps them productive. Think less affiliate manager, more B2B growth lead.
4. Land and validate Gift Cards. Stand up the BD motion, partner economics, and product/lifecycle stack this channel needs. This is a new bet: your job is to move fast, find the right retail and distribution partners, test the model, and make a clear call on whether to scale or deprioritize within a defined timeframe.
5. Incubate the next bets. Growth Channels is the team's proving ground for new partnership models before they earn enterprise-level investment. When a new channel or partner type shows up on the roadmap — a new distribution format, an untested vertical, a model that doesn't yet fit the Enterprise playbook — this team runs the experiment. Your job is to define what "viable" looks like, build the minimum operating model needed to test it, and make a clear, time-bound call: scale it, hand it off to Enterprise, or kill it. Gift Cards is today's example of this motion; there will be others.
6. Build the operating system that lets a lean team scale. Hire and coach the right shape of team across BD, growth marketing, lifecycle, and ops. Build the cadences, dashboards, and playbooks that let one PM-equivalent run numerous types and cohorts of partners. Set the bar for what "good" looks like — tracking quality, activation rates, time-to-first-transaction and retention. Work closely with your counterpart leading Enterprise Partnerships so both teams are running on shared infrastructure and consistent incrementality standards.

Your toolkit

What we expect you to bring:

• 8+ years in growth marketing or partnerships, with at least 3 leading a partner/affiliate, B2B, or B2B2C growth function at a marketplace, two-sided platform, or SMB-led product.
• SMB growth marketing chops. You've personally built partner acquisition motions — referral programs, SEO/organic plays, SaaS marketplace listings, community channels. You know how to find and convert small business partners at scale.
• Affiliate and deal mechanics. Commission design, tiering, caps, placements, promo strategy, partner governance (SEM rules, coupon policy, fraud prevention). You can negotiate the deal and audit it after launch.
• Analytical and incrementality fluency. Attribution trade-offs, holdout tests, cannibalization checks, multi-channel vs. last-click. You translate data into deal terms and budget moves, not slide decks.
• Lifecycle thinking. You've shipped or directly overseen activation and retention via product and email — onboarding flows, time-to-first-sale, performance digests, and win-back. You think in partner journeys, not just acquisition.
• People leadership, and operational excellence. You've hired, coached, and run a team of 3–15 across BD, growth marketing, lifecycle, and ops. You build the systems and dashboards that let the team scale without adding headcount proportionally.
• Cross-functional credibility. You've partnered with Product on tooling roadmaps, Finance on payout economics, Legal on partner contracts. You move fast without burning bridges.