Chief Marketing Officer (Remote, USA)

Do you want to join a team that will embrace your motorsports obsession? Are you someone who builds systems and scales measured results? Can you speak the lingo and oversee the development of a brand whose voice is technical and far from fashion? Apex is looking for a Chief Marketing Officer who understands car enthusiasts not as a demographic, but as a community they genuinely belong to. If this sounds like you, read on.

Who are we?

Apex Wheels creates Real Performance wheels for drivers everywhere. That means designing and manufacturing wheels that don’t just look the part, but truly improve performance in a measurable way. Born on the track and raised in California, Apex was founded in 2007 as a passion project by diehard motorsport enthusiasts and has produced function-first, race-proven wheels ever since. Now boasting a team of 40+ staff members, all Apex products are designed by an in-house team of engineers who are just as passionate about motorsports as you.

Objective

Reporting to the CEO, the Chief Marketing Officer is responsible for ensuring that marketing spend is a measurable and scalable driver of revenue growth, brand differentiation, and long-term customer appreciation. You will lead all marketing functions, including Brand, Creative, Audience Growth, eCommerce, and paid media. While working closely with executive leadership to align strategy and execution with company goals, you’ll help the marketing team define where to invest and why, build systems that drive efficiency and accountability, and clearly prove what’s working and what’s not.

Job Summary

Success in this role means that marketing is a clear and measurable driver of Apex’s growth. This requires a leader who can establish focus and make deliberate tradeoffs. Not everything will get done, and that is by design. The team must operate with clear priorities, strong ownership, and speed to execution, and leadership has confidence in marketing decisions because they are grounded in both data and sound experience-based judgment.

To succeed, you must bring a genuine connection to automotive enthusiast culture, because motorsport enthusiasts have a big problem that we’re on a mission to solve. Fashion wheels dressed up as performance wheels have flooded the market. These are under-engineered parts that overpromise and underdeliver, and they’re everywhere. The word “Performance” has been hijacked and watered down. With no watchdogs, little regulation, and almost nothing in the way of objective facts, buyers are easy prey. It should mean something real. Something that’s tested and backed up by cold, hard numbers. It’s time to draw a line in the sand and separate fact from fiction. We call it Real Performance, and it’s the hill we’re willing to die on.  For this reason, you must understand our customers intuitively and have the ability to distinguish what feels authentic from what does not. 

You are able to recognize which ideas are strong and will resonate, allowing you to trust your team without getting pulled into execution. You evaluate decisions through both a brand and consumer lens as well as a financial one. Our Brand is not surface-level fashion; it is technical and speaks truth to industry misinformation. You are tasked with guiding our technical experts to bring extensive education to the masses without falling flat. An education that will get consumers to change their buying priorities. Without a real connection to the consumer, it will be difficult to guide the team and succeed in this role.

You bring meaningful experience to senior marketing leadership roles with direct accountability for revenue, budget allocation, and performance outcomes. If you have not been responsible for Marketing’s P&L before, you don’t have the experience we need. If you focus on the results of your team’s work and not the costs to get those results, then this won’t be the right fit. You have to be allergic to vanity metrics and present defensible data to the executive team.

If you have not led teams through periods of organizational change, you likely don’t have the experience our people need. You will inherit a team that is working through the challenges of its second leadership transition in recent years. This role requires a leader who can quickly establish focus, build trust, and create momentum through decisive action and measurable results. 

You must be fluent in the language of modern marketing performance. You are very comfortable operating in an eCommerce-driven environment and understand how marketing contributes across the full customer lifecycle. You can make sound technical investments and give guidance to e-commerce specialists.  This role requires the ability to interpret the data, assumptions, and tradeoffs coming from your directors, ask the right questions, and translate those insights into clear, defensible decisions at the executive level. You cannot rely solely on your team to tell you what is working. You are expected to understand it well enough to validate it, challenge it, and stand behind it.

We value experience working in founder-led businesses more than experience in highly structured or agency-heavy environments. This role is not a fit for candidates who cannot clearly connect their decisions to business outcomes. Focused, lean, entrepreneurial tactics have given us outsized results. We’re not looking to pivot over to burning big budgets for industry-average results. This role needs to hone in on our secret sauce and scale that up, and not spread us thin with the mundane tactics we’ve missed.

How to apply

In the space provided for your cover letter, tell us about your connection to automotive or motorsports culture. If you’re not an enthusiast, tell us what you are passionate about.

Responsibilities

• Marketing Oversight: Develop and execute Apex’s company-wide marketing strategy that supports our growth goals while staying true to our brand. Oversee brand and Creative, ensuring that initiatives represent our brand well, meet interdepartmental needs, support our growth goals, and reinforce Apex’s credibility within the enthusiast community. Oversee Audience Growth & Engagement to enhance digital marketing, including SEO, paid media, and lifecycle marketing strategies that drive customer acquisition, retention, and long-term value. Oversee eCommerce, in partnership with technical experts, to ensure that initiatives are informed by customer behavior and insights, and our website is achieving optimal conversions. Partner with the COO and Director of Sales & Marketing to design and execute high-impact strategies. Partner with the COO and Education Manager to support consumer education strategies. Partner closely with our CFO to ensure that marketing spend is appropriately paced, well considered, and that our dollars are spent on the most impactful initiatives.
• Performance: Translate company goals into actionable marketing plans with defined success metrics, timelines, and ownership. Establish clear priorities across marketing initiatives, making deliberate tradeoffs to focus on the highest-impact work. Establish and enforce planning, prioritization, and execution processes that enable speed and clarity across the organization. Ensure marketing investments are evaluated against expected outcomes. Ensure that our goals and KPI frameworks are accurately measuring success. Lead and coach your team to relying on performance data to drive decision-making through the use of dashboards, and reporting to track performance, inform decisions, and improve ROI. Manage the marketing budget, resource allocation, and vendor relationships to maximize efficiency and effectiveness.
• Leadership: Provide executive leadership, coaching, and development to a multi-functional marketing team, including hiring, performance management, and organizational design. Design and evolve the structure of the marketing organization to ensure the right capabilities exist in-house and that agency spend is efficient and intentional. Ensure the team has the right skillsets and structure to execute at the pace needed to support our goals. Create a culture of ownership, accountability, and performance as informed by our company values.

• A genuine motorsports enthusiast who understands our customers and has a strong passion for this space.
• 5+ years of experience in a senior marketing leadership role (CMO, Head of Marketing, VP of Marketing, or similar) with direct accountability for marketing performance tied to revenue, cost, and profitability.
• 5+ years of experience making resource allocation decisions across marketing initiatives, including prioritizing investments, managing tradeoffs, and reallocating spend based on performance.
• 7+ years of experience owning or directly influencing eCommerce performance across the full customer funnel, including acquisition, conversion, and retention.
• 7+ years of experience building, leading, or restructuring marketing teams in environments requiring improved performance, clarity, and accountability.
• 7+ years of experience overseeing brand development and creative direction, with demonstrated ability to ensure brand and content effectively support business objectives and resonate with a discerning customer base.
• Strategic thinker with a keen eye for market trends and consumer behavior.
• An analytical mindset with the ability to utilize data-driven insights to inform marketing decisions.
• Strong organizational and project management skills with a focus on meeting deadlines and achieving goals.

• Full-time salaried exempt employment with Apex. Annual compensation ranges from $180-230k, depending on location and experience, plus eligibility to participate in our short-term incentive plan after 90 days of employment.
• Work from home support $600 annual stipend for cell phone and internet usage, all technology needs provided by Apex, plus workspace equipment reimbursements.
• Robust health benefits that include medical insurance covering 100% of monthly premiums for employees and their dependents under the age of 14 on our base plans, and generous contributions towards premiums for dependents over 14. We have a wide variety of other medical plans, so you can contribute to a more robust plan that better suits your needs. Get access to an HSA, mental health support, gym membership discounts, and a healthcare concierge! Apex covers 100% of employee premiums for Dental and Vision benefits on our base plans, plus affordable buy-up options if you need orthodontic coverage. 
• Retirement savings eligibility to participate in our 401(k) with company contributions.
• Paid time off to recharge and do what fuels you through paid sick leave, vacation time, and paid company holidays, including Juneteenth and Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
• Motorsports lifestyle benefits to get you involved in the community as deeply as you’d like. Think reimbursements for high-performance driving events (HPDEs), track day insurance, event spectator tickets, karting and karting school, sim racing gear, SCCA-compliant gear, and premium events like DirtFish and SkipBarber. Plus, huge employee discounts on our products and free merch!
• Eligibility for college grants and loan forgiveness programs through SEMA by way of your employment with Apex.
• A modern professional work environment supported through remote work, almost anywhere in the contiguous U.S., and casual in-office dress (t-shirts and jeans are the norm). Department-led in-person events often include sim-racing, karting, spectator events, and visits to some of our favorite places in Northern California.

About the Environment

This job can work remotely from home in any contiguous US State. Your core team works on Pacific hours, so expect to work a schedule that best supports them.  While performing the duties of this job, the employee may be regularly required to stand, sit, talk, hear, reach, stoop, kneel, and use hands and fingers to operate a computer, telephone, and keyboard. Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision requirements due to computer work. Ability to sit at a computer terminal for an extended period. Light lifting may be required. Ability to travel by ground or air to attend team-building events.  Quarterly domestic travel for team building events, annual or semi-annual travel for leadership summits. Regular, predictable attendance is required. Must have the ability to read, write, speak, and understand English.

Our Selection Process

Apex is a founder-led organization deeply rooted in our values. Each individual at Apex meaningfully contributes to our success. Work outcomes are highly visible in our small team, and so every great new hire has the potential to positively impact our work and culture.  Our selection process is rigorous with the goal of finding the best overall fit for each position. We use an EEOC-compliant assessment tool to measure behavioral drives and cognitive ability as one of many indicators of potential job fit. We meet virtually with candidates multiple times because, while first impressions matter, mutual alignment and capabilities matter more. We often engage our finalists in a short-term paid work assignment before making the final determination to extend an offer. This allows our finalists to get a realistic picture of life at Apex and our team to assess real performance on the job.