Senior Director, Community & Advocacy

Braze•Chicago, IL

20h•Hybrid

About The Position

Braze powers the world's most ambitious consumer engagement programs — and the Braze Community is the practitioners, certified experts, and ambassadors who run them, building their careers and defining the standard for the discipline. You will own that ecosystem: our flagship community platform, our customer advocacy program, our executive Customer Advisory Boards, and our customer storytelling motion. You'll lead a focused, senior team of five and partner closely with Product Marketing, Content Marketing, Customer Experience, Demand Generation, and our events teams. These programs are healthy, growing, and genuinely loved — tens of thousands of practitioners in the product monthly, a digital community in the thousands, champions in the hundreds. What they are not yet is fully wired into how Braze retains and grows customers. That's the job: take programs people admire and make them programs the business runs on.

Requirements

You've led a customer advocacy program at scale.
You've built or substantially grown a reference, champion, or ambassador program in B2B software — the operating infrastructure, the tiers, and the GTM relationships that make teams pull from it by default.
You've run a customer community of meaningful scale.
You know the difference between community as a marketing channel and community as a customer experience, and you optimize for the second because the first follows.
You've lived through a migration or re-platforming and have opinions about it.
You're comfortable in pipeline conversations. Influence dollars, references closed, expansion influenced — you can defend the function's investment with credible numbers, as a peer to sales and CS leaders.
You operate cross-functionally at a senior level. PMM on storytelling, Content on narrative production, CX on advocacy enablement, Product on roadmap, Demand Gen on regional and field programs, Events on flagship moments.
When you disagree with a peer, you say so and resolve it.
You're a builder. A five-person team and a function whose next chapter is integration, not maintenance, reads to you as opportunity.
You develop people. Your reports stay, grow, and become the next layer of leaders.
You build with the tools of the moment. New platforms, AI tooling, new operating models — you experiment and push how your team works.

Nice To Haves

Experience in MarTech, customer engagement, or adjacent B2B SaaS categories
Background spanning both community and education / learning programs
Direct experience scaling an advocacy platform (e.g., ChampionHQ, Influitive) or community platform (e.g., Higher Logic Vanilla, Bevy)
Multi-region community programs across AMER, EMEA, and APAC
Public speaking presence and a point of view on the future of customer-led growth

Responsibilities

Lead the community function. Own the strategy and operating cadence of Braze Bonfire — online forums, regional meetups, and recognition programs.
Wire the community into how Braze operates: community signals feeding account health and CS workflows, support deflection measured, and meetups planned jointly with our regional events strategy as a deliberate retention and expansion lever, not a parallel calendar.
Lead the advocacy function. Own Braze Customer Champions end-to-end: a tiered program producing a steady supply of references, speakers, storytellers, and product co-creators.
Make pulling from the champion bench the default move for every customer-facing team.
Measure influence with rigor: pipeline-touched, references-sourced, advocacy-led content produced.
Own our Customer Advisory Boards. Run a small number of high-stakes CABs aligned to Braze's flagship moments.
Build the executive-to-executive experience that earns time from our most strategic customers, and partner with Product and PMM to turn customer insight into roadmap and narrative.
Own customer storytelling. Stand up the testimonial capture motion across video, written, and quotable formats, and keep customer voices flowing into case studies, campaigns, and analyst-facing programs with PMM and Content Marketing.
Connect community, advocacy, and learning. Braze is building a unified customer empowerment ecosystem — learner → community participant → advocate → champion.
Co-design the journeys, shared identity, and measurement framework that make it feel like one experience.
Lead and develop a team. Your team of five — digital community, advocacy (principal + specialist), and community & learning events (manager + specialist) — is a high-ownership group where every person carries a program.
Set direction, raise the bar, and develop them, while operating credibly with VPs and SVPs across Braze.
Run the function on numbers. Own a clear KPI tree: engagement, advocacy influence dollars, share of at-risk and expansion accounts touched by community and events motions, CAB follow-through, story volume and utilization.
Build investment cases on that framework.

Benefits

Competitive compensation that may include equity
Retirement and Employee Stock Purchase Plans
Flexible paid time off
Comprehensive benefit plans covering medical, dental, vision, life, and disability
Family services that include fertility benefits and equal paid parental leave
Professional development supported by formal career pathing, learning platforms, and a yearly learning stipend
A curated in-office employee experience, designed to foster community, team connections, and innovation
Opportunities to give back to your community, including an annual company-wide Volunteer Week and donation matching
Employee Resource Groups that provide supportive communities within Braze
Collaborative, transparent, and fun culture recognized as a Great Place to Work®