Senior Director, Content & Audience Growth

Toast

12d•Hybrid

About The Position

Toast is seeking a Senior Director, Brand Content & Audience Growth to build and lead the restaurant industry's definitive owned media brand. You will own data storytelling & editorial production, social and creator, and audience development. Turning Toast's proprietary data across 170,000+ locations into the stories, benchmarks, and IP that operators, press, and LLMs cite as the default source on how restaurants actually work. This role sits within Brand Marketing and owns a set of highly visible, high-leverage content and audience systems that directly impact brand authority, pipeline, and long-term category leadership. This is a builder role that requires a growth mindset. You will design, pilot experiments, ship them across every unpaid surface (search, LLM answers, social, creator, community, newsletters, and in-product rails) while owning adoption, audience, and outcomes. You will operate with autonomy, influence senior stakeholders, and translate data, experimentation, and learning velocity into clear editorial and commercial decisions. The ideal candidate brings a media operator's taste and a systems builder's rigor. Someone who wants to build durable audience engines, not just publish content. The bet Toast is making a multi-year investment to build the definitive owned media property for the restaurant industry — a personality-led, data-rich, audience-first brand operators genuinely seek out. This is where Toast is investing most heavily in brand over the next two years, and it is purpose-built to meet the LLM moment head-on.

Requirements

15+ years of experience with the items below:
Media Brand Building: You've worked inside real media brands or stood up an owned media property inside a company. A publication, newsletter, show, or platform people actively seek out. You have an instinctive sense of what 'good' looks like when a media property is actually working: voice, cadence, talent, audience loyalty, and the editorial bar.
Editorial + Social/Creator at Scale: You've led editorial and modern social/influencer/creator strategy together. The exact combination this charter requires, and a genuinely rare profile in B2B.
Cross Functional Leadership: This is a highly cross-functional role. You're experienced and comfortable driving programs that engage Toasters across Brand, Revenue Marketing, PR/Comms, Legal, PMM, Product, Data, and IR. Getting results via collaboration is your default settling.
Audience Growth Operator: You've grown and retained audiences; subscribers, return users, community, and you know how to measure fandom, not just reach. You think in compounding loops, not campaigns.
Data Storytelling: You've turned proprietary datasets into benchmarks, indices, and IP the press and analysts cite. You think in franchises, not one-offs.
Strategic Thinking: You have experience exercising strong business judgement and intuition. You can operate at different altitudes; you are comfortable diving deep into analytics and audience data, but also know how to zoom out to the highest level and tailor insights for the right audience (e.g., working team vs. Senior Team).
AI-first Application Experience: Experience applying AI to fundamentally change how content gets made, how audiences find it, and how Toast shows up in LLM answers. You have a strong, tested POV on LLM visibility and you'd never outsource taste to a tool.
Comfort with Ambiguity: You thrive in undefined environments where there is no playbook. The LLM era is rewriting inbound in real time and we intend to be a first mover. You are comfortable building as you go, leading from the front, and taking an iterative approach to break down blockers.

Nice To Haves

Experience in restaurants, hospitality, SMB, fintech, or adjacent operator categories
Familiarity with workflow automation platforms (e.g., Make, Zapier, n8n) connected to AI APIs
Experience with analytics platforms (e.g., GA4, Snowflake, HEX) and SEO/LLM visibility tooling
Experience partnering with PR/Comms, IR, and executive comms at a public company

Responsibilities

Build and own the Toast Media Network end-to-end, from editorial POV and voice through production, distribution, audience growth, and ongoing optimization.
Build a social and culture-led programming engine that turns Toast's POV, data, and talent into moments operators actually care about — owning brand social channels, cultural franchises, creator and influencer programs, and the operator-creator ecosystem as one integrated system that builds fandom and extends the media brand's voice.
Architect Toast's POV on the market in partnership with Brand Strategy and PR/Comms: the connective tissue between what we believe, what we publish, and how the market (including LLMs) hears it.
Design and run growth experiments (franchises, formats, channels, AI-powered workflows) to rapidly learn what drives audience, citation share, and pipeline, and scale what works.
Create clear, data-driven roadmaps that deliver near-term authority and audience wins while building toward a scalable, long-term media and data storytelling engine in partnership with PR/Comms, who lead earned media activation and all press relationships for data programs.
Lead flagship franchises through their full lifecycle, including Data by Toast and newsletters. From scrappy early pilots to operationalized, always-on programs.
Drive measurable outcomes, including share of LLM citations on a fixed high-value query set, citation velocity and backlinks per release, newsletter growth and open rate
Partner cross-functionally with Revenue Marketing, Web, Brand Strategy, PR/Comms, PMM, Product, Data, and IR to ship integrated programs.
Apply AI-first strategies to content production, distribution, LLM visibility, and audience intelligence. Improving speed, consistency, and the quality of every asset we ship.
Lead and grow a senior, integrated team of 10–12.