Sr. Associate Manager, Digital Customer Data and Engagement Solutions

About the Role

The Sr Associate Manager, Digital - Customer Data & Engagement Solutions is a senior individual contributor and technical leader within Customer Data & Solutions. The role owns the connection between customer data, identity, decisioning, and activation, turning complex data and engagement requirements into scalable, activation-ready solutions across CRM, lifecycle, loyalty, and personalization use cases.

This role is accountable for solution direction, data readiness, and activation patterns - not simply execution. The Sr Associate Manager partners across Data Engineering, Middleware, Analytics, Lifecycle, Loyalty, Product, and agency/platform partners to identify gaps early, establish repeatable patterns, and move work from ambiguous request to reliable production capability.

The Day-to-Day

Customer Data Architecture & Activation Readiness

• Lead the solution approach for customer data used in CRM and digital engagement, including customer signals, attributes, events, audience inputs, identity mappings, consent, and downstream activation requirements.
• Assess source-of-truth, data type, coverage, timeliness, grain, and one-to-one mapping before data is operationalized for activation, partnering with the appropriate data owners to validate assumptions.
• Define repeatable activation patterns for moving trusted data through CDP/warehouse, Braze, and related platforms without creating unnecessary one-off implementations.
• Proactively identify data quality, schema, identity, latency, and integration gaps and coordinate resolution with the appropriate owning teams, escalating when decisions or tradeoffs are required.

Engagement Solution Architecture & Enablement

• Own technical solution design for CRM, lifecycle, loyalty, personalization, and experimentation workflows across email, push, in-app, SMS, and offer constructs.
• Define reusable activation patterns, segmentation approaches, orchestration standards, QA/release controls, and implementation guardrails that improve consistency, quality, and speed to market.
• Serve as a senior technical authority for how engagement solutions are designed and activated, balancing scalable architecture with practical delivery needs.
• Guide complex or non-standard campaign designs and act as the escalation point for solution decisions that cross data, platform, and channel boundaries.

Data, Identity & Integrations

• Partner with Data Engineering, Middleware, Analytics, and platform teams on APIs, webhooks, event schemas, data contracts, identity resolution, consent, and operational data flows.
• Validate whether existing workflows and platform capabilities can support a requirement before recommending new pipelines, custom events, or net-new architecture.
• Use data and technical analysis to diagnose issues, determine the appropriate owner, and distinguish activation work from deeper analytics or data-science needs.

BAU Enablement & Operating Model

• Own or shape the CDS operating model for BAU activation, including intake, complexity triage, review triggers, QA/release readiness, launch validation, and post-launch learnings.
• Create clear ownership and escalation paths across CDS, Lifecycle, Loyalty, Data, Analytics, Engineering, and agency/platform partners.
• Continuously identify opportunities to simplify, automate, standardize, or shift work to the right operating team so CDS can scale without unnecessary manual effort.

AI Decisioning, Personalization & Automation

• Translate AI decisioning outputs, recommendations, scores, and dynamic content into activation-ready customer data and orchestration patterns.
• Partner on Braze AI Decisioning and agentic workflows with appropriate controls, monitoring, human-in-the-loop review, and operational guardrails.
• Prioritize AI and automation opportunities that build on stable data and reusable activation patterns rather than creating unnecessary bespoke complexity.

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Lead through influence across Product Management, Data Engineering, Middleware, Analytics/BI, Lifecycle Marketing, Loyalty, Engineering, and agency/platform partners.
• Bring forward recommendations, tradeoffs, risks, and decisions without waiting for every next step to be assigned.
• Communicate complex data and architecture topics clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders and create durable documentation that enables others to operate independently.

Team Development & Capability Building

• Mentor junior team members and raise the team's technical capability through playbooks, reusable patterns, documentation, and knowledge sharing.
• Help establish standards that reduce dependency on individual knowledge and improve resilience when priorities, partners, or staffing change.
• May manage 1-2 direct reports depending on team needs and operating model.

What Success Looks Like

• Can independently take an ambiguous customer-data or engagement problem, clarify the requirement, identify the authoritative data source, assess feasibility, and recommend the right path forward.
• Is recognized by xFN partners as a primary technical owner for defined customer data and engagement workstreams.
• Builds reusable patterns and operating standards that reduce rework, manual review, and dependency on individual team members.
• Raises risks early, proposes options, and moves work forward without requiring frequent manager intervention.
• Creates clear data and solution documentation that allows CDS, agency, and partner teams to execute consistently.

Is This You?

• 8+ years of experience in customer data, marketing technology, CRM/lifecycle, digital solutions architecture, or related enterprise technology environments.
• Hands-on experience with customer engagement platforms (Braze preferred) and the ability to connect data, segmentation, orchestration, and channel execution.
• Strong working knowledge of CDP / customer data architecture, data modeling, SQL, data quality, event schemas, APIs / middleware, identity resolution, consent, and data governance.
• Experience designing or troubleshooting data flows across warehouse/CDP, activation platforms, and downstream measurement or decisioning environments.
• Ability to evaluate data readiness and feasibility, identify the appropriate owner, and distinguish scalable product/platform solutions from one-off implementations.
• Experience supporting personalization, experimentation, AI decisioning, or automation workflows and translating outputs into activation-ready solutions.
• Proven ability to independently lead multiple concurrent initiatives in a fast-paced, cross-functional enterprise environment.
• Strong communication, influence, and documentation skills with the ability to simplify complex technical topics for business and technical audiences.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business, Marketing, or a related field (or equivalent experience).

Preferred Experience

• Snowflake, Hightouch, Adobe Experience Platform, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Tealium, AWS, Redshift, or comparable CDP / customer data ecosystems.
• Experience with loyalty, offer, or identity platforms and cross-system customer data integrations.
• Experience establishing activation governance, QA frameworks, operating models, or reusable solution patterns in a complex enterprise environment.

Salary Range: $120,000 to $140,000 annually + bonus eligibility. This is the expected salary range for this position. Ultimately, in determining pay, we'll consider the successful candidate’s location, experience, and other job-related factors.