Blogs

Who Really Poached Your Head of Growth

Published

4 hours ago

09/24/2026

Kossi Adzo

Hiring a good marketer takes longer this year than it did two years ago, and it costs more once it finally works. The people you actually want are not looking. The people you already have are getting messages. Anyone who has tried to fill a growth seat since spring knows this without a chart.

The exit is the part that stings. Your performance lead, the one who finally made paid social pay for itself, gives notice on a Tuesday. The new job is “at an international company.” The offer is in euros, the work is remote, and the number is one you were never going to match. You never learn who the competitor was. Somewhere you have never shared a conference panel with, and it knew exactly what your best person was worth.

There is an industry that hires marketers constantly, pays in euros, does not ask what city you live in, and almost never appears in the hiring roundups founders read. The reason is one word. Put “casino” in a headline and half the audience closes the tab. Inside, though, the org chart looks like yours: growth, CRM, product, data, content, SEO, a head of marketing, a COO. Same titles, different paychecks. Over the next five minutes I will show you how much bigger, why, what a founder can copy without going near a slot machine, and which doors a marketer walks through.

Table of Contents

Start with your own head of marketing

You know what yours costs; it is on an offer letter you signed. Same title at a licensed online casino operator in Malta: a mid-level head of marketing takes home €7,000 to €9,500 a month. Senior, €10,000 to €14,000. Once the whole function reports to them, €15,000 to €25,000, plus a bonus of 30 to 100 percent of base. All net, per month, before bonus. The remote version of the same job, done from Tbilisi or Kyiv, still pays €5,000 to €7,000 at mid-level and €11,000 to €16,000 at the top.

Two rungs down sits the affiliate manager. Base pay at mid-level in Malta is €3,300 to €4,500, which sounds ordinary until you add the variable part: a percentage of the net gaming revenue produced by the partners this person signs and keeps. For strong managers it matches the base or beats it.

The gap has nothing to do with titles, and it is not a Malta cost-of-living story either; the remote column says the same thing. In most software companies marketing is a cost center that hands pipeline to sales. Here marketing is the revenue engine, and pay tracks how close a seat sits to the money.

Where the ladder jumps

The figures below are monthly net pay in euros, without bonus, from junior to head. The office column covers Malta and Cyprus, where licensed operators keep their headquarters. The remote column is the same title from Tbilisi, Yerevan or Kyiv.

Role	Malta and Cyprus, junior → head	Remote, junior → head	What moves the pay
Content manager	€1,700–2,300 → €5,500–7,500	€900–1,400 → €4,000–5,500	Pages in several languages
SEO specialist	€1,900–2,600 → €7,000–10,000	€1,000–1,600 → €5,000–7,500	Link budgets in a crowded niche
CRM manager	€2,100–2,800 → €7,000–10,000	€1,100–1,700 → €4,800–7,500	Revenue from existing players
Media buyer	€2,000–2,800 → €8,000–13,000	€1,000–1,700 → €5,500–9,000	Profit share on funnels, 5–30%
Affiliate manager	€2,100–2,800 → €7,500–12,000	€1,100–1,700 → €5,000–8,000	Percentage of partner NGR
Retention manager	€2,300–3,000 → €7,000–10,000	€1,200–1,800 → €4,800–7,000	Bonus budget and retention metrics
Product manager	€2,600–3,400 → €10,000–15,000	€1,600–2,300 → €7,000–11,000	A product that runs 24/7 under license
Head of Affiliates	€4,000–5,000 → €12,000–18,000	€2,500–3,500 → €9,000–13,000	Variable 30–100% on channel NGR
Head of Marketing	€5,000–6,500 → €15,000–25,000	€3,200–4,500 → €11,000–16,000	Acquisition across every market
Country manager	€4,500–6,000 → €15,000–22,000	€3,000–4,200 → €11,000–15,000	P&L for one regulated market
COO	€8,000–11,000 → €25,000–40,000	€5,500–8,000 → €19,000–28,000	The whole operation, plus equity

Three of the jumps are worth slowing down for.

The first is from content and CRM to media buying and affiliate management. A senior media buyer in Malta earns €5,000 to €7,500 base and a share of the profit on the funnels they run, 5 to 30 percent depending on the team’s model. A senior affiliate manager earns €5,000 to €7,000 base plus that percentage of partner revenue. These are the first seats where pay is attached to money the person brings in.

The second is product. A senior product manager earns €6,500 to €9,000 in Malta and a head of product €10,000 to €15,000, more than a head of CRM or retention at the same grade. The reason is the product itself: a wallet, a game lobby and a bonus engine that never go offline, live in a dozen jurisdictions, with a regulator who reads the release notes.

The third is where someone signs a P&L. Head of Affiliates at €12,000 to €18,000, Head of Marketing at €15,000 to €25,000, country manager at €15,000 to €22,000, COO at €25,000 to €40,000. Each carries a variable part of 30 to 100 percent of base; at COO level it is 50 to 150 percent plus options. Founders underestimate the country manager: the job is knowing the market’s payment methods, ad rules and regulator by name, not just the language. The full salary ladder by role on SpinHire covers 35 positions.

Why an operator cannot just buy ads

Picture launching a consumer app. You open an ad account, upload the creative, set a budget, and by morning you know your acquisition cost. An operator cannot do that. Ad platforms restrict gambling ads and require certification market by market, and every market needs its own license before the first ad runs. So the budget a software company would pour into paid social goes through partners instead: review sites, streamers, newsletters, each sending traffic for a share of revenue or a fee per depositing player. The affiliate manager is the operator’s sales team for the channel that matters most, which is why the role is paid on revenue and why the head of that function earns close to what the head of marketing earns.

Operators own the brand and the player: DraftKings and FanDuel in the United States, Betclic in Europe, hundreds of smaller names. Platform providers such as SOFTSWISS sell them the software stack. Game studios build the games and take a share of what they generate on every operator that carries them.

Then there is the clock. The product runs around the clock in dozens of countries, each with its own payment methods and bonus rules. When it is night in Europe it is still evening in Latin America, and somewhere a withdrawal is stuck. A typical Monday for a retention manager starts with weekend numbers from three markets in three currencies and ends with a promo calendar that legal reads first.

Malta and Cyprus are the hubs because that is where the licenses are, and a license needs people on the ground. Half the staff of a Malta-licensed operator may be working from home in Tbilisi, Yerevan, Kyiv and Warsaw; RedCore, SOFTSWISS and DraftKings are among the industry’s biggest remote hirers.

What to bring to your next planning meeting

First, know who you are competing with. Your senior performance marketer is, here, a senior media buyer at €5,000 to €7,500 net in Malta plus a profit share, or €3,500 to €5,500 remote. Those numbers are after tax, and the recruiter messaging your team knows them.

Second, copy the parts that cost nothing. Publish the number; candidates here expect a range in the posting. Put the variable part on the metric the person moves: affiliate managers on partner revenue, media buyers on funnel profit, retention managers on a 10 to 25 percent bonus tied to retention metrics. And hire across time zones on purpose; the remote column is lower and the pool behind it larger.

Three doors, and you know who is standing at each

The first is for the performance marketer running paid social for a direct-to-consumer brand. Media buying does not ask for a gambling résumé. It asks what budgets you have spent and what came back. A junior media buyer starts at €2,000 to €2,800 in Malta, €1,000 to €1,700 remote, and a senior earns €5,000 to €7,500 in Malta plus that share of funnel profit.

The second is for the email marketer whose lifecycle program was always the nice-to-have. Here it is a revenue line. A junior CRM manager earns €2,100 to €2,800 in Malta, a senior €4,800 to €6,500, a head of CRM or retention €7,000 to €10,000. The same door opens with no marketing experience at all: a support agent with B2 English and a willingness to work shifts starts at €1,500 to €2,000 in Malta or €700 to €1,200 remote, the most common first step toward a CRM seat.

The third is for the salesperson or account manager who is good on a call and better at follow-up. Affiliate managers come from sales, marketing and support, often with no industry experience if the English is there. Entry pays €2,100 to €2,800 in Malta or €1,100 to €1,700 remote, a senior reaches €5,000 to €7,000 plus the revenue share, and since many of these seats are remote, a page of remote iGaming affiliate jobs shows what the market is asking this month.

Go back to that Tuesday. Now you know what the offer looked like: a base close to yours, a variable tied to a number the person controls, no question about the city. The industry pays marketers well because it could never buy attention the way everyone else does. It had to build a channel out of people, and people who own a channel get paid like owners. Next time a recruiter calls your growth lead, you will know what is on the other end of the line, and if you copied the cheap parts, the call may be shorter than they expected.