Marketing Manager - Food Vertical

Be the strategic owner and orchestrator of the food vertical's growth agenda, setting the marketing strategy, leading the team, and ensuring all channels switch on in coordination with every functional team delivering their part on time. This role focuses on Food vertical growth activities and not the quick-commerce vertical. Build, own, and continuously optimise a 360-degree integrated marketing engine (OOH, performance marketing, CRM/lifecycle, social media, influencers, BTL, partnerships, commercial deals, and any activation) to drive performance objectives (acquisition, reorder, retention) alongside brand objectives (awareness, engagement, and affinity). Take full ownership of your designated geography and its growth: the strategy, the budget and its allocation, the campaigns, and consumer visibility. Acting proactively to drive growth by initiating plans, ideas, and tests.

Responsibilities

• Own the marketing strategy and growth plan for the Food vertical in your UAE, translating order targets into channels, cities, and budget roadmap.
• Own the performance-marketing channel, pacing against target CAC/CARC by sub-channel, and aligning with the relevant stakeholders to reallocate spend toward the highest-return campaigns to maximise incremental orders per dirham.
• Own and defend the core campaign efficiency metrics: ROI, CPIO, CPA. Benchmarking per campaign and making scale-or-cut decisions on actionable insights.
• Own the full food growth marketing CARC, ensuring efficient allocation across channels, cities, teams and being accountable for the return on every dirham of spend.
• Own budget forecasting and planning cycles, building bottom-up order forecasts by campaign, city and sales portfolio, and managing mid-month reallocations and scenario models (best/base/worst) as performance and seasonality shift.
• Own co-funding and partner-funded marketing, co-managing with sales team on investment from restaurant chains, structuring jointly funded campaigns, tracking committed vs realised funding, and ensuring co-funded activity hits agreed return and reporting obligations.
• Oversee the food customer lifecycle in partnership with CRM, owning the journey from acquisition through activation, reorder, retention, win-back and churn prevention and also aligning paid activities/vouchers within lifecycle stages so acquisition translates into repeat behaviour and rising LTV, not just first orders.
• Own customer retention economics, tracking new-vs-existing customer mix, cohort payback and retention curves by city and acquisition source, and steering budget toward the cohorts and channels with the strongest long-term value.
• Expertise in looker to own all performance reports and dashboards related to food growth. Design dashboards and lead all performance deep dives and reports covering customers cohorts, orders, basket analysis, frequency and budgets.
• Own the weekly performance review with the management, having a clear narrative: performance vs target and forecast, key drivers, risks and recommended actions.
• Design and run the experimentation in partnership with the product team for any new app feature: A/B creative tests, geo and holdout tests, and incrementality studies to measure true incremental impact and feed budget allocation decisions.
• Comfortable/experience with using AI tools.
• Own the creative strategy for campaigns. Briefing the internal/external agencies, managing the asset calendar, and driving creative refresh to combat fatigue and protect efficiency of visual assets.
• Define the channel-mix and audience strategy across performance, CRM/lifecycle, social, influencers, BTL, partnerships and commercial deals, balancing upper- and lower-funnel investment to hit acquisition, reorder, retention goals.
• Own the marketing trade calendar and campaign governance, sequencing always-on activity with key commercial moments (Seasonal, spike campaigns, brand campaigns) and ensuring on-time, on-quality communication across relevant teams.
• Partner with senior cross-functional stakeholders across Sales, Product, CRM, Brand and Finance, aligning on tracking, definitions and instrumentation so reporting reconciles end-to-end.
• Track market & competitor promo parity to proactively initiate campaigns, tests and have budget shifts in response.
• Champion best practice, automation and innovation with the team to drive continuous improvement.

Qualifications

• Minimum of 8 years of relevant experience in growth, marketing, and campaign management preferably in an e-commerce, F&B aggregator, or tech company.
• Expertise in understanding the marketing mix and campaign management.
• Expert in analytics (Excel and google sheets).
• Plus if experienced in looker/tableau.
• Strong project management and analytical skills.
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills.
• Strong in analysis and a very numbers oriented person.
• Comfortable working in a challenging environment.
• Fluent in English (Arabic is a plus).

Location: UAE