Director, Data Management

Spark Foundry was built during the most transformative time in the history of advertising and marketing. We deliver everything a traditional media agency has to offer and have grown into one of the world’s most successful agencies by helping brands evolve their marketing by leveraging identity, commerce, artificial intelligence, and more to connect with people. Transformation is part of our DNA.

Spark Foundry’s start-up spirit delivers high-touch approaches and a never-ending desire to challenge the status quo. Combined with Publicis Media’s powerhouse soul leveraging connected data assets, advanced AI applications, and investment clout, we "Bring HEAT to Brands." No other agency possesses the expertise that we do to address today’s most pressing challenges to drive business transformation through media.

The Director, Data Management Lead is the primary client and agency point of contact for media and pharmaceutical data management. This role defines the end-to-end data management approach, guides backend architecture in Databricks and Snowflake, and ensures that data is accurate, secure, compliant, traceable, and fit for reporting, measurement, optimization, and advanced analytics.

Embedded within the Data & Analytics organization, this role blends functional data leadership with hands-on engineering. The lead partners across client, media, analytics, technology, privacy, and offshore teams; brings forward scalable data engineering best practices; and can roll up their sleeves to design, build, troubleshoot, and optimize data flows. Knowledge of pharmaceutical media, HCP data, privacy and compliance requirements, and applied AI is highly valued.

• Own the client and agency data management and governance operating model across media, measurement, and pharmaceutical data domains.
• Define standards for data ownership, lineage, metadata, naming conventions, taxonomies, access, retention, and fitness for use.
• Establish measurable data health controls, SLAs, stewardship routines, issue escalation paths, and governance forums.
• Translate regulatory, privacy, security, and client requirements into practical controls, with working knowledge of HCP and other sensitive pharmaceutical datasets considered a strong advantage.

• Lead ingestion, validation, reconciliation, monitoring, and delivery of media data across paid search, social, programmatic, video, display, offline, and publisher sources.
• Design media data quality guardrails, automated checks, thresholds, and exception handling across source-to-report pipelines.
• Own error tracking and defect management, including triage, root-cause analysis, remediation ownership, SLA monitoring, and prevention of recurrence.
• Ensure transformed and harmonized datasets reconcile to source systems and satisfy reporting, measurement, optimization, and audit requirements.

• Serve as the primary point of contact for client data discussions, including data strategy, architecture, onboarding, quality, governance, issue resolution, compliance, and delivery readiness.
• Guide client, media, analytics, engineering, ad operations, privacy, security, and offshore teams through clear requirements, RACIs, decisions, dependencies, risks, and escalation paths.
• Lead source onboarding and change management so media plans, buys, identifiers, taxonomies, and required metadata flow correctly into downstream platforms.
• Build trusted client relationships by communicating technical topics in business terms and providing clear recommendations, trade-offs, owners, and next steps.