Marketing Automation Specialist, Salesforce Marketing Cloud

EF Education First / Hult•Cambridge, MA

4h•Hybrid

About The Position

EF Tours is looking for a Marketing Automation Specialist to join their Digital Experience team. This is a high-impact, execution-focused role designed for a SQL expert who enjoys the fast-paced nature of marketing operations. As the primary owner of audience development, the specialist will be responsible for taking the marketing campaign calendar and building the SQL queries that power daily emails, complex journeys, and multi-segment triggers. The role involves working within Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) and Snowflake to ensure every campaign is fueled by accurate, real-time data. EF, founded in 1965, is a global association of education companies with a mission of opening the world through education, fostering understanding between people and cultures through language, cultural exchange, academic studies, and educational travel. EF Educational Tours specifically partners with educators to provide immersive international travel programs for students, focusing on building essential skills and personal growth.

Requirements

Thrive in an environment with a high volume of tasks, be detail-oriented, and take pride in meeting deadlines on a busy campaign calendar.
Understand the business context and proactively identify and flag issues, such as a student audience receiving a parent-facing email.
Possess deep expertise in joins, subqueries, and window functions (ROW_NUMBER(), PARTITION BY), and know how to pivot logic when a platform doesn't support a specific feature (like QUALIFY).
Have 2+ years of hands-on experience in SFMC Automation Studio, understanding Data Extensions, Contact Builder, and the nuances of SFMC's SQL engine.
Have experience querying Snowflake to pull data into marketing tools.

Nice To Haves

Experience with dbt (Data Build Tool).
Knowledge of SFMC Data Views for tracking campaign performance.
Experience with AMPscript for dynamic email personalization.

Responsibilities

Act as the primary technical resource for our email and SMS marketing calendar, translating campaign briefs into production-ready SQL logic to populate SFMC Data Extensions.
Build, automate, and maintain SQL queries for high-volume sends, including multi-brand deduplication, suppression logic (unsubscribes/district policies), and "waterfall" audience analysis.
Design the data entry and decision-split logic for multi-step customer journeys, ensuring that travelers move through the lifecycle correctly based on their CRM status.
Leverage AI tools to accelerate the development, testing, and optimization of SQL queries and automations, improving build speed, accuracy, and scalability for high‑volume audience execution.
Rapidly diagnose and fix query timeouts or data discrepancies to ensure the morning email sends remain on schedule.
Refactor legacy CRM SQL logic into SFMC-compliant T-SQL as the company migrates to the Salesforce ecosystem.
Ensure all queries are optimized for performance (SARGable) to handle millions of rows within SFMC’s Automation Studio limits.
Work within Snowflake using dbt to create the underlying views that simplify daily execution tasks.
Manage complex exclusion logic across multiple brands (International vs. Domestic) and maintain master suppression lists to ensure brand safety and compliance.
Perform rigorous QA on all audiences before they go live, ensuring that personalization strings (First Name, Points Totals, Tour Names) are perfectly aligned with the source of truth.

Benefits

Commitment to professional growth: robust monthly calendar of trainings and workshops
Four weeks paid vacation your first year, ten paid holidays, and two floating holidays
Exciting business travel opportunities
25% company match on your 401(k) contributions
Market-leading medical, dental and vision coverage, along with options for life and disability insurance, accident and hospital insurance, legal and pet insurance
Dependent care, healthcare and commuter Flex Spending Accounts (FSAs)
Access to fertility care and family-building support
Wellness benefits including a yearly fitness reimbursement
Frequent social and learning events, including access to our employee-run resource groups
Robust Employee Assistance Program
Tenure-based sabbatical eligibility
EF Product Discounts (discounts on travel, international language schools, Au Pair program and more)
Discounts at local venues and businesses
Amazing offices designed to match the caliber of the people who work there, plus the flexibility of working from home one day a week.
Compensation range for this role is $65,000-$85,000 based on experience.