Growth marketing jobs at London startups.

By Callie, Talent Scout for the Marketing and Generalist streams at Jumpstart. Updated September 2026.

The marketing candidates who message me are usually stuck in the same spot: three or four years into an agency or a brand team, good at the craft, and tired of never seeing the whole picture. You run the campaign, someone else owns the number it feeds into, and you find out how it landed secondhand in a client report.

A startup's first or second marketing hire doesn't have that problem, because there's no one else to own the number. That's the trade I talk through with every marketing candidate on a call: less structure, a lot more ownership, and your work showing up directly in the business rather than a deck about the business.

What the first marketing hire actually does

The title varies more here than almost anywhere else I recruit for: growth manager, content and community lead, senior marketing manager, or a founder's associate with a marketing lean at the earliest stage. Underneath, the job has a consistent shape.

• You run acquisition, whatever channel actually works for that audience, not a fixed playbook. Paid, content, community, partnerships. Early on you'll test several before you know which one earns its keep.
• You build the measurement yourself. There's no analytics team. You decide what counts as a result and you're the one who explains it when a founder asks why the number moved.
• You make things, not just brief them. Founders increasingly want someone who can shoot and edit a rough video, write the landing page copy, or brief a freelancer well, because there's rarely a full creative team behind you.
• You cover brand and performance in the same week. A DTC and B2B business won't have a separate person for each; you'll switch between long-term brand thinking and this-week's campaign before lunch.

Roles like this I've filled

What it pays

Marketing roles through my stream mostly land between £30k and £60k. Where you sit in that range comes down to whether you've owned a budget or a growth number before, not which platforms you know. A senior marketing manager role at a profitable, later-stage company will pay toward the top; an earlier, broader founder's-associate-with-marketing-lean role gives you more scope but starts lower.

What gets someone the offer

• A number you've actually moved, even a small one. "Grew signups 40% on a modest monthly budget" lands better than a list of platforms you've used.
• Comfort making things yourself when there's no one else to brief. A rough video you shot and edited solo tells a founder more than a portfolio of agency decks.
• Fluency in what a founder actually cares about, cost to acquire, lifetime value, payback, not the definitions but the trade-offs between them.
• Willingness to be the entire marketing function for a while. If you want a specialist team around you from day one, wait for a later-stage company.

Positioning yourself before you apply

Rewrite your CV around outcomes and budgets rather than platforms or clients. If you're at an agency, pick the one or two accounts where you had the most control and write those up properly, with numbers, rather than listing every client you've touched.

Then think honestly about the stage you actually want. An earlier company means building the tracking and the creative from nothing, which suits people who like a blank page. A later, better-resourced company means a growth budget already exists and someone just needs to spend it better, which suits people who'd rather optimise than build from scratch.

Your video pitch on Jumpstart matters more for marketing candidates than for almost anyone else I place, because it's your work sample. It has an audience, a deadline and one message to land. I watch a lot of these, and the good ones are obvious in the first ten seconds.

How working with me actually goes

Book a 15-minute call. If the Marketing stream fits, you're on the platform with a profile and a video pitch within 24 hours, and founders pitch their roles to you on video before you apply. About 80% of candidates who hit that window land a role within four to six weeks. Free for candidates. I can't support visa sponsorship or candidates in full-time study, so please don't book if either applies.