Director, Personalization & CRM Marketing Operations

Realtor.com•Austin, TX

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Director of Personalization & CRM Marketing Operations will lead and build our CRM & Personalization ecosystem. This role bridges high-level business strategy and technical execution, ensuring the continued health and output of our customer engagement and personalization platforms — primarily Braze and Cordial, in addition to a soon-to-be-established CDP (Segment Engage). You will serve as the primary orchestrator between Marketing, Product, and Engineering, keeping critical infrastructure migrations on track, guiding a live AI decisioning proof of concept, and improving our Agile team. You will lead the Ops team’s AI transformation — with the goal to drive more efficiencies and campaign delivery through AI. This is a hands-on leadership role with real ownership: you will represent CRM Operations in executive reviews, remove blockers for CRM and CDP ops developers, and ensure the team continues to accelerate output while maintaining quality.

Requirements

12+ years of experience in CRM or marketing operations, with at least 5 years leading technical teams including CRM ops developers.
Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience.
Deep hands-on expertise with enterprise ESP/CRM platforms — specifically Braze and/or Cordial — including campaign architecture, audience logic, and platform administration.
Experience leading a CRM ops team at scale (with send volumes in the billions and complex data).
Proven track record managing large-scale backend migrations where data continuity is the primary risk.
Expert-level command of Agile/Scrum methodologies, with experience running multi-team sprint ceremonies and maintaining delivery velocity.
Strong executive presence: ability to represent operational health to senior leadership, translate technical issues into business impact, and communicate clearly under pressure.
Proven ability to manage vendor relationships and serve as a primary technical point of contact for external MarTech partners.
Deep AI expertise and desire for continuous learning and improvement.

Nice To Haves

Claude Enterprise and Claude Code preferred, with experience connecting various MCPs and building complex workflows, automations, and coding with these tools.
Experience with Segment Engage, Hightouch or similar CDP and/or reverse-ETL / audience orchestration tools for importing data into Braze or Cordial and the website.
Familiarity with Snowflake for understanding and troubleshooting marketing data pipelines.
Hands-on experience with AI or ML-driven marketing automation pilots, including POC design, monitoring, and results analysis.
Working knowledge of Jira, Airtable, Confluence, and Miro for project management and documentation.
Familiarity with Splunk for operational monitoring and alerting.

Responsibilities

Oversee Scrum processes across multiple technical CRM teams, including daily stand-ups, bi-weekly sprint planning, retrospectives, and backlog refinement sessions.
Hold the team accountable to commitments and push for more innovation and speed.
Partner with CRM Product Owners to balance high-impact initiatives alongside essential backend maintenance and infrastructure work.
Identify and remove blockers for developers and engineers to maintain delivery velocity throughout the engagement.
Monitor ongoing Snowflake-to-Braze and Cordial data imports via Hightouch and future Segment Engage; escalate and resolve data sync failures quickly.
Manage the AI Decisioning lifecycle through build, launch, and performance monitoring.
Lead your team in an AI transformation — accelerating productivity, CRM campaign coding, and ultimately output.
Serve as the primary technical point of contact for Braze, Cordial, and Segment Engage, owning bi-weekly technical check-ins and solution reviews.
Monitor platform health across platforms; triage alerts and coordinate with MarTech and Notifications engineering teams when issues arise.
Ensure all MarTech imports have active monitoring and consistent alert naming conventions.
Represent CRM Operations in Weekly Business Reviews — translating complex operational issues into clear performance insights for executive leadership.
Partner with Product Marketing, Performance Marketing, Software Engineering, and Analytics to keep the CRM roadmap aligned with broader company goals.
Lead bi-weekly MarTech/CRM Sprint Grooming sessions with Product Owners to review and prioritize development tickets.
Manage a team of CRM & CDP ops developers.
Maintain weekly 1:1s with a team of CRM ops developers, engineers, and Product Owners to improve culture and unblock work.
Provide mentorship and clear direction across CRM Ops, Product Management, Scrum, and cross-functional engineering partners.
Act as the escalation point for complex integration issues, production incidents, or competing sprint priorities.