Director, Marketing Operations

JOB DESCRIPTION

The Director, Marketing Operations is responsible for the operational strategy, execution, reliability, and advancement of the platforms and processes that power Hearst Newspapers' digital subscription marketing strategy. This role leads day-to-day marketing technology operations across Sailthru, Blue Conic, Casper, subscription rates and offers, data integrations, and platform quality assurance, ensuring the marketing technology stack operates reliably while continually improving how Marketing uses technology, data, AI, and automation.

This is a centralized role supporting nine markets, with responsibility for building consistent, scalable processes and capabilities across the portfolio.

The ideal candidate is a technically fluent marketing operations leader who combines deep hands-on marketing technology experience, strong data and systems thinking, and disciplined operational leadership. This person will manage a distributed team of four and serve as a key bridge between Marketing and Product, Business Intelligence, Editorial, Finance, Customer Service, and technology vendors - translating marketing needs into clear requirements, identifying new capabilities and opportunities, and driving adoption across marketing and newsrooms.

• Lead and develop the Marketing Operations team, managing workload, performance, priorities, and professional development while establishing clear ownership, service levels, operating rhythms, and accountability.
• Own the Marketing Operations intake and prioritization process, evaluating incoming requests, allocating team capacity, managing tradeoffs, and keeping stakeholders aligned on timing, scope, and dependencies.
• Own day-to-day marketing technology operations across Sailthru, Blue Conic, Casper, and any other future platforms, including platform administration, workflows, audience segmentation, campaign activation, personalization, troubleshooting, documentation, governance, and scalable execution across markets, with particular responsibility for supporting Marketing and newsroom teams in their use of Sailthru.
• Ensure operational reliability across recurring marketing processes, integrations, audience and data flows, rates and offers, tracking, and platform capabilities; proactively monitor for issues, diagnose root causes across systems, and partner with BI, Product, and vendors on resolution and safeguards.
• Oversee email operations across newsletters, lead generation, acquisition, retention, and other lifecycle communications, including audience selection, campaign/template setup, scheduling, suppression logic, deployment, and operational readiness. Partner closely with marketing and newsroom teams to strengthen newsletter capabilities, workflows, and best practices.
• Manage the operational setup and governance of checkout and cancellation flows, subscription rates, pricing configurations, and promotional offers, partnering with Finance, Marketing, Product, and Customer Service to ensure accurate implementation across customer experiences.
• Serve as Marketing's close partner to the Product Director and as the primary Marketing-to-technology translator: turn loosely defined business problems and ideas into clear functional, data, and operational requirements; support prioritization, ideation, implementation, testing, and rollout; and translate technical capabilities, constraints, and tradeoffs into practical marketing implications and opportunities.
• Proactively identify opportunities to expand Marketing's capabilities through existing or new technology, data, AI, automation, and self-service. Assess business value and operational feasibility, reduce manual work and handoffs, enable appropriate self-service, and move the strongest opportunities from concept to implementation while maintaining governance and human oversight.
• Manage marketing technology vendors, including relationships, contracts, renewals, platform performance, issue resolution, roadmap alignment, and service levels. In partnership with Product and technical stakeholders, represent Marketing in evaluating prospective technology and assessing capabilities, gaps, integration needs, and tradeoffs against business requirements.
• Lead capability rollout and adoption across Marketing and newsrooms by translating new functionality into usable workflows, documentation, training, governance, and operating practices; establish rigorous QA and change-management standards to ensure capabilities are…