Director, Campaign Operations

Cengage Group•Virtual US OH, OH

5d•$138,200 - $221,100•Remote

About The Position

At Cengage, our employees have a direct impact in helping learners around the world discover the power and joy of learning. We are bonded by our shared purpose – driving innovation that helps millions of learners improve their lives and achieve their dreams through education. We are seeking a strategic and operationally minded Director of Campaign Operations to lead the vision, strategy, and execution of marketing programs, mature our campaign operations ecosystem, and drive growth. This role will report to the Vice President, Marketing Operations within Cengage's marketing center-of-excellence and will lead a team responsible for enabling efficient, scalable, and high-quality campaign execution and evolution for Marketing. The Director, Campaign Operations will define how campaigns move from strategy to execution—bringing together people, process, technology, workflow, and data to help marketers execute more effectively. This leader will build a modern campaign production model that balances operational rigor with flexibility and innovation while enabling increasingly personalized customer experiences at scale. The role requires a blend of strategic leadership, operational excellence, and technical depth. The ideal candidate is a player-coach: equally comfortable defining a long-term capability roadmap and rolling up their sleeves to solve complex execution challenges alongside their team. This is a leadership role for someone with a proven track record of building efficient campaign operations in complex enterprise environments, translating marketer needs into scalable capabilities and services, and leading high-performing teams. This is a remote role with occasional travel required.

Requirements

10+ years of experience in marketing operations, campaign operations, marketing automation, or related marketing technology and production functions, including experience leading teams in complex enterprise environments.
Demonstrated experience building and operating efficient, scalable campaign production or marketing automation models.
Strong understanding of marketing strategies, campaign operations, marketing automation, workflow management, and production processes.
Experience translating business and marketer requirements into technology, process, workflow, or automation solutions.
Demonstrated experience improving operational efficiency, campaign velocity, quality, and time-to-market.
Strong understanding of personalization, segmentation, customer journeys, testing, and campaign optimization.
Experience managing internal production teams alongside external agencies, managed services, or other flexible resource models.
Strong analytical skills and experience using operational and performance data to drive prioritization and continuous improvement.
Ability to balance strategy with operational execution and technical problem solving.
Strong executive communication, marketing partner management, and cross-functional leadership skills.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on expertise with marketing automation platforms, with Salesforce Marketing Cloud strongly preferred.
Proficiency with Workfront or other enterprise workflow and work management platforms.
Success operating within centralized marketing operations organizations or center-of-excellence models.
Success supporting large-scale B2B, B2C, and/or B2B2C campaign operations.
Expertise building personalization programs and automated customer journey capabilities.
Working knowledge of AI-enabled marketing workflows, content operations, and campaign optimization.
Strong understanding of email, audience data, and customer communication governance, including CAN-SPAM, CCPA, GDPR, consent management, accessibility, deliverability, and privacy requirements.
Industry background in education, EdTech, SaaS, digital learning, publishing, or similarly complex enterprise environments.

Responsibilities

Define and evolve the enterprise campaign operations strategy, operating model, production processes, governance, and service model to enable scalable campaign execution.
Build and optimize an efficient production model using a combination of internal teams, marketer self-service, and external agency or managed-service resources.
Establish planning standards, templates, workflows, intake processes, and reusable campaign components that help marketers work faster while maintaining quality and consistency.
Drive operational excellence by measuring and improving campaign production timelines, velocity, throughput, quality, and predictability.
Identify bottlenecks and opportunities across the campaign lifecycle and implement improvements that accelerate time-to-market, increase quality, and drive outcomes.
Establish clear expectations, operational metrics, and continuous improvement practices across campaign operations.
Own the campaign operations capability roadmap, translating business priorities and marketer needs into scalable campaign execution, personalization, and automation capabilities.
Partner with Marketing, Revenue, Digital, and Product leaders to align campaign investments and operational priorities with growth objectives.
Define and evolve capabilities that improve customer engagement, including audience targeting, journey orchestration, personalization, and lifecycle marketing.
Identify and prioritize opportunities to improve marketer productivity and campaign effectiveness through automation, AI, reusable content, self-service, and workflow innovation.
Translate operational insights and marketer feedback into new services, capabilities, and ways of working that accelerate growth.
Balance capability expansion with operational efficiency, scalability, and long-term sustainability.
Provide leadership and governance for campaign operations platforms and integrated systems, including Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Workfront, Data 360, and related technologies.
Serve as the campaign operations subject matter expert, representing campaign execution requirements in MarTech, data, workflow, and architecture discussions.
Partner with Marketing Technology, Data, Digital, Analytics, and IT teams to ensure campaign capabilities are scalable, integrated, secure, and aligned with enterprise architecture.
Guide the design and implementation of automated customer journeys, triggered communications, and campaign execution frameworks.
Establish governance for campaign configuration, audience management, workflow, templates, data usage, and operational standards.
Monitor platform performance, campaign health, deliverability, data quality, and operational reliability.
Ensure campaign operations capabilities align with enterprise data models, privacy requirements, compliance standards, and technology roadmaps.
Partner with marketers, audience owners, and campaign managers to translate business objectives into efficient and scalable campaign execution plans.
Implement testing, measurement, and optimization practices that improve campaign effectiveness and operational efficiency.
Build dashboards and reporting that provide insight into production workflow, campaign velocity, quality, service levels, and execution outcomes.
Own campaign operations prioritization and capacity planning frameworks.
Use operational and campaign performance data to find opportunities for improvement and prioritize investments.
Establish mechanisms to capture feedback from marketers and continuously improve the campaign experience and operating model.
Build strong partnerships across Marketing, Sales, Revenue Operations, Digital, IT, Analytics, Legal, Marketing Technology, and Marketing Operations.
Be an advisor to help Marketing improve results across automation, email, and owned channels while staying within governance and compliance.
Serve as a strategic partner to marketers by understanding their needs and helping translate those needs into scalable capabilities and operational solutions.
Develop documentation, training programs, playbooks, and onboarding materials that enable marketers and campaign teams to work effectively within the campaign operating model.
Help establish clear roles, responsibilities, and decision-making processes across teams involved in campaign planning, production, activation, and measurement.
Resolve complex campaign operations and platform-related challenges while identifying themes for foundational solutions.
Lead, coach, and develop a distributed team of automation strategists and campaign producers.
Balance efficient execution within campaign squads, with a broader center-of-excellence approach that elevates marketing operations across the entire global organization.
Build a strong player-coach culture where leaders and team members combine operational rigor with hands-on problem solving.
Establish clear goals, development plans, performance expectations, and success metrics for team members.
Manage external agency and managed-service resources to ensure clear accountability, efficient use of capacity, and high-quality delivery.
Build organizational resilience through documentation, cross-training, standardized processes, and scalable ways of working.