Affiliate Marketing Lead

Shopify

Shopifyhttps://www.shopify.com

About the discipline Growth at Shopify

Every discipline at Shopify works close to real merchant problems. You'll join a team that owns meaningful scope, ships to a high bar, and helps millions of entrepreneurs start, run, and scale their businesses.

Growth and rewards Mastery-matched compensation. Explore rewards

~Mastery

At Shopify, getting better at your craft and increasing your impact is how you grow. Twice a year, we assess both in our ~Mastery cycle, Shopify’s performance review. Achieving higher ~Mastery is a promotion, and when you earn a promotion your total rewards grow with it. Crafter and manager are equal paths, so you can pursue excellence in the craft you’re best at.

Total Rewards

With Flex Comp, your Rewards Wallet gives you agency over your compensation mix. Adjust your mix of cash, restricted share units, and stock options (including programs like Long-Term Equity)* to where it makes sense for you, and mix it up anytime as life and priorities change. Buying a house? Want more skin in the game? Just experimenting? It’s your call.

• Flex Comp program offerings vary based on location, role, and employment type. Full details are set out in our Terms & Conditions and related plan documents.

Built for real life Room for the rest of your life.

Flexible work, remote by design

A flexible vacation policy means most Shopifolk can take the vacation days they feel they need to recharge.

If a change of everyday scenery is more your jam, Destination 90 means you can work from (almost) anywhere in the world for 90 days of the year.

Your setup

Your battlestation is your home base. Request the desk, chair, and AV gear you need to get shit done.

Benefits

• You need ‘em, we’ve got ‘em. Our health and welfare benefits may include health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance depending on your country. If you’re in a country without a package, you'll receive a monthly allowance. We also offer mental health support for you and your dependents, including immediate and confidential services like counseling and coaching sessions.

• Family support

• We offer fertility benefits globally, along with paid parental leave to welcome a new family member.

• Applying to work here

• Show us your craft.

• Read the candidate guide

• 1Life Story

• The Life Story is how we understand the themes of your career journey so far, human to human. What you’ve learned, and how you made a difference. Show us the trophies and the bruises: the problems you’ve solved, the challenges you encountered, the decisions you made, and the lessons you learned along the way.

• 2Craft assessment

• We’re looking for world-class crafters. Crafters obsessed with pursuing excellence in their field. Our craft assessment looks at your personal journey toward mastery, and your potential to go broader and deeper in novel ways.

• You’ll start with an online assessment, followed by a craft assessment. Show us what you do best, and how you do it. Shopify’s bar is high. Let your skills do the talking.

• 3Craft interviews

• Building on your craft assessment, these interviews dive deeper into your experience and technical aptitude. Depending on the role, this may include technical deep dives focusing on projects you've previously worked on, collaborating in a design critique, exploring a dataset using SQL, or taking the lead on solving a problem with your interviewer as your co-pilot.

• Pssst. Extraordinary technical work speaks for itself.Skip the resume. Show us what you’ve built instead.

• Take the /alt path

The role

We are building Shop's paid acquisition channels. Affiliate is one of them, and it is yours to build and run. This is a hands-on role. You will pick the platform, sign the publishers, wire the tracking, set the payouts, watch for fraud, and prove the channel is worth the money. You will help shape the strategy and own the execution.

Shop is the consumer brand inside Shopify. Shop has hundreds of millions of users and lets customers discover new brands, pay quickly and safely via Shop Pay, and track deliveries

The mandate: take affiliate from proof of concept to an always-on program with clean tracking, healthy economics and a defensible read on incrementality. You will work with paid media, data, product, creative, Legal, Finance, and external partners to build a new growth capability inside Shop.

• Build the program. Select and manage the affiliate platform or network. Own the account setup, tracking implementation, terms, and the partner-facing program details.

• Recruit publishers. Source and onboard partners across content and editorial commerce, cashback and rewards, loyalty apps, deal sites and browser extensions. Decide which categories we want, and which we don't.

• Own the economics. Set and negotiate commission structures by partner and by action. Model payback, watch cost per install and cost per new buyer, and cut what doesn't pay.

• Wire the tracking. Own mobile and web attribution end to end: deep links, deferred deep links, postbacks, install and event tracking, and the QA to prove each link works before it goes live.

• Prove incrementality. Last click will flatter this channel. Build the tests that show real lift — holdouts, geo tests, coupon and cashback exclusions — and report the honest number.

• Police it. Monitor for fraud and policy abuse: install farms, cookie stuffing, trademark bidding, coupon leakage, off-brand placements. Enforce the terms.

• Report and document the numbers. Build dashboards, metric definitions, QA checks, weekly reporting, partner records, tracking conventions, and payout forecasts that make the channel easy to run and evaluate.

• Handle the money. Forecast payouts, manage invoicing and accruals with Finance, and keep partner payments accurate and on time.

• Work with creative and product. Brief the assets partners need, keep messaging on brand, and work with Shop product teams on landing experience, offer mechanics and the path from click to first purchase.

• Use AI. Put AI tools to work on partner research, outreach drafting, anomaly checks and analysis. Speed matters here.

What you'll own

• The affiliate channel end to end: platform, partner mix, terms, tracking, payouts, performance.

• Publisher recruitment, onboarding, activation and ongoing relationship management.

• Commission structure and partner-level economics, including negotiation.

• Attribution and tracking implementation and QA across app and web, with the mobile measurement partner and Shop product teams.

• Incrementality testing and the reported effect of the channel.

• Fraud, compliance and brand safety monitoring, including FTC disclosure and trademark policy enforcement.

• Dashboards, weekly reporting and payout forecasting with Finance.

• Partner-facing assets, offers and program communications, built with creative.

• Documentation, naming conventions and operating hygiene for the channel.

• Proposals for the next partner category or test, backed by data.

Requirements

• 5–10 years in affiliate, partner or performance marketing, with hands-on ownership of an affiliate program at consumer scale.

• Direct experience in an affiliate platform (for example Impact, Partnerize, Rakuten, CJ, Awin, or an in-house equivalent). You have run the account, not managed someone who did.

• Track record building or scaling a channel, not only inheriting and optimising one.

• Strong analytical skills. You can size an opportunity, model payback and write your own SQL or advanced spreadsheet analysis without waiting on an analyst.

• Working knowledge of mobile attribution: deep links, deferred deep links, postbacks, install tracking, and tools like AppsFlyer, Branch or Adjust.

• Measurement judgment. You know last click overstates affiliate and can design and defend a test that shows true lift.

• Experience negotiating commercial terms with partners and comfort holding a partner to them.

• Exceptional attention to detail. Broken links, wrong payouts and duplicate credit are the failure modes here, and you catch them before they ship.

• Experience spotting and shutting down affiliate fraud and policy abuse.

• Clear, concise written communication. Short readouts, plain conclusions, no burying bad results.

• Comfortable working with Finance on forecasts, accruals and partner payments.

• Bonus: cashback and rewards partners, coupon and extension ecosystems, multi-market programs, commerce or fintech background.

• Shopifyhttps://www.shopify.com