Head of Rewards Monetization

Job Description

The Role

This is a founding, zero-to-one role. You will own the entire demand side of a monetization platform that we are building from the ground up. Your mandate: fill our new offer API with the best-paying, highest-quality advertisers in the industry, and make the EPCs we deliver to partner apps impossible to beat.

That means sourcing and signing advertisers and demand partners (game studios, offerwalls, ad networks, lead-gen buyers, survey routers) before there's an established product to point to, negotiating pricing and quality terms that beat what our competitors get, and working hand-in-hand with our developers to design and build the integrations — every partner's feed, API, SDK, and postback — that the platform will run on. You will sit in our office, work directly with the founder, and be measured on the revenue-per-click of every partner app we monetize.

What You'll Do

Build the demand side from zero

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• Own the full demand-side pipeline from a cold start: identify, pitch, negotiate, sign, and manage advertisers and offer sources across rewarded gaming (CPI/CPE), lead gen, surveys, finance, and shopping verticals.
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• Prioritize direct advertiser relationships over rebrokered supply from day one so the platform launches with strong margins and pricing power.
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• Build and maintain a live map of which demand source pays best for each offer, geo, and user segment, and design how the platform routes accordingly.
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Rate negotiation & EPC ownership

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• Negotiate payouts, tier structures, quality-score thresholds, caps, and multi-event pricing models (registration → install → IAP milestones) with every partner.
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• Own EPC as your core KPI for every partner app on the platform. Diagnose underperforming supply, renegotiate rates, restructure event ladders, and kill sources that can't compete.
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• Defend and grow our pricing by managing advertiser quality metrics (D0/D7 ROAS, payer rates, retention cohorts, reversal/chargeback rates) — you must be able to argue the math on a quality call and win.
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• Protect margins: structure deals so that quality clawbacks, delayed attribution windows, and tier demotions never put us underwater.
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Technical buildout (with our dev team)

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• Help design the offer API itself: offer data model, targeting and eligibility logic, cross-referenced pricing, offer A/B testing, and attribution — you are the voice of the advertiser and the partner app in every architecture conversation.
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• Spec and drive every advertiser and network integration: offer feeds (API or flat-file), server-to-server postbacks, sub-ID/macro passthrough, event mapping, targeting configs, SDK-vs-API tradeoffs, and end-to-end QA.
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• Work fluently with MMP data (AppsFlyer, Adjust, etc.) and our tracking stack to reconcile conversions, debug postbacks, and resolve attribution disputes with partners.
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Partner-app monetization strategy

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• Design the monetization layer for each partner's rewards app: which verticals, which advertisers, which event structures, and what economics the consumer incentive can support.
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• Run structured supply tests (capped pilots with pre-agreed KPIs) and scale what wins.
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• Feed learnings back into offer ranking, user targeting, and qualification logic to lift both quality scores and EPC simultaneously.
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Requirements (strict — do not apply if you don't meet these)

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• 7+ years in performance marketing / mobile monetization , with at least 4 years specifically in the rewarded/incent ecosystem (offerwalls, GPT/rewards apps, rewarded ad networks, or incent-accepting advertisers).
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• You have personally built or run monetization for a rewards product — a GPT app, offerwall, or rewarded placement — with direct P&L or revenue ownership. Advisory or agency-only experience does not qualify. Experience taking a rewards product from zero to monetized (supply-side cold start, first integrations, first dollar) is close to mandatory given the nature of this role.
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• An existing, verifiable rolodex of demand-side relationships in the rewarded space (e.g., game studios buying incent installs, offerwall/network demand teams, lead-gen buyers). You should be able to name partners you've signed and deals you've structured — this platform launches on your relationships.
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• A documented negotiation track record with numbers : payout increases won, tier structures you restructured, EPC/ARPU lifts you drove, or margin you recovered. Be prepared to walk through at least two deals in detail, including the quality math.
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• Deep fluency in rewarded economics : EPC, eCPM, CPI/CPE/CPA/revshare models, multi-event payout ladders, D0/D7/D30 ROAS targets, payer rates, LTV curves, quality scoring, caps, pending windows, and reversal/chargeback mechanics. You will be tested on these in the interview.
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• Genuinely technical : comfortable reading API documentation, understanding JSON offer feeds, postback/S2S tracking, sub-ID and macro passthrough, attribution windows, and SDK-vs-API integration tradeoffs — and able to write a clear integration spec a developer can build from without hand-holding. (You don't need to write production code, but you must never be the bottleneck between an advertiser's docs and our dev team.)
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• Hands-on experience with MMPs and tracking platforms (AppsFlyer, Adjust, Tune/HasOffers, Everflow, or equivalent), including debugging broken postbacks and reconciling conversion discrepancies with partners.
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• Full-time, in-office, 5 days a week. You'll work directly alongside the founder. No remote, no hybrid, no exceptions.
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• Comfortable with ambiguity: no playbook, no existing product, no established process. You'll be writing all three.
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• Willingness to operate in fast, informal channels (Slack with partners, same-day pricing calls) and move at startup speed.
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Strongly Preferred

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• Direct working relationships with rewarded demand/supply players or comparable companies.
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• Experience negotiating quality-score-tiered pricing agreements and dynamic-pricing models with advertisers.
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• Experience on the lead-gen side: coreg, per-lead pricing, bucket-based funnels, and vertical-specific compliance (auto, finance, legal, sweepstakes).
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• Familiarity with sweepstakes/promotional compliance as it applies to rewarded products (no-purchase-necessary structures, entry economics).
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• Prior experience helping design or launch an offer API, offerwall, or ad-serving platform alongside an engineering team.
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• SQL or spreadsheet-modeling skills strong enough to build your own EPC/margin models without waiting on analysts.
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What Success Looks Like (first 12 months)

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• The platform launches with real demand depth: signed advertisers across every major vertical (gaming CPE, lead gen, surveys, shopping), with at least two competing sources per vertical and no single-partner concentration risk.
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• The first partner rewards apps are live on the API, monetizing, and hitting EPCs competitive with — or better than — what those partners could get anywhere else.
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• Deal structures hold up under scale: zero quality-driven chargebacks or margin-negative weeks caused by how a deal was written.
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• Every demand integration is live, monitored, and reconciled — and you can tell the CEO, from memory, which partner pays best for any given offer category and why.
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Compensation