Senior Manager, Marketing Operations

Western Digital•San Jose, CA

21d•Remote

About The Position

We're looking for a Senior Manager of Marketing Operations to be the operational backbone of our Corporate Marketing organization — and a close operating partner to the VP of Corporate Marketing. This person will own our budget, drive our semi-annual planning process, bring rigor to how we use data and analytics, and act as a chief of staff across the org: helping prioritize, coordinate, and keep cross-functional work moving. This is a high-visibility, high-trust role designed for someone with the capability and ambition to grow in the role over time. We're looking for someone who already operates with Executive-level judgment - who can walk into ambiguity, build the system that's missing, and represent the marketing organization credibly with Finance, cross-functional partners and senior leadership.

Requirements

7–10+ years in marketing operations, revenue operations, or a related operational/analytical role, ideally within a complex or matrixed B2B organization.
Strong analytical fluency: able to understand data sources, methodologies, attribution approaches and KPI definitions well enough to challenge assumptions, identify inconsistencies and distinguish signal from noise.
Hands-on experience with Salesforce and Marketo (or comparable marketing automation/CRM platforms) even if not immediately applied here, this experience needs to be real and current enough to be credible.
Strong track record owning a budget of meaningful size, including forecasting and variance management, and partnering directly with Finance.
Demonstrated ability to design and run a planning process for a function or organization, not just participate in one.
Operational Rigor: Builds systems and processes that scale, rather than relying on one-off effort each cycle. Comfortable being the person who brings structure to ambiguity.
Analytical Judgment: Can interpret data critically, spot inconsistencies, and ask the hard question rather than taking a number at face value. Translates data into a recommendation, not just a report.
Executive Judgment & Trust: Exercises discretion and sound judgment operating close to senior leadership. Communicates clearly and concisely, in a way that's ready for executive consumption.
Business & Financial Acumen: Understands how marketing investment connects to business priorities and can make thoughtful tradeoffs across competing needs. Comfortable moving between marketing language, financial language and executive-level business discussions.
Cross-Functional Influence: Earns credibility and cooperation from function leads without formal authority over them. Comfortable pushing back constructively when priorities conflict.

Nice To Haves

You've run a budget and a planning process before, and you have opinions about what worked and what didn't.
You ask “where did this number come from” as a reflex, not an afterthought.
You've supported a senior leader in a chief-of-staff-like capacity and understand the difference between administrative support and operating partnership.

Responsibilities

Own the Corporate Marketing budget end-to-end: tracking, forecasting, variance analysis, and reconciliation across the fiscal year.
Partner directly with Finance on budget planning, quarterly reviews, and reforecasts - translating marketing priorities into financial terms Finance trusts.
Build visibility into spend by function and campaign so leadership always has an accurate, current view of where investment is going and what it's returning.
Flag risk early: over/under-spend trends, vendor commitments, and budget reallocation needs, before they become a surprise.
Establish disciplined spend governance across vendors, agencies, POs and commitments, ensuring forecast reflects both actual and committed spend.
Own and run the semi-annual planning process for the Corporate Marketing organization end-to-end: timeline, templates, cross-functional input, and synthesis into a single, coherent plan.
Partner with each function lead (Brand, Integrated Campaigns & Content, PR/AR, Product & Technical Marketing) to translate goals into resourced, sequenced plans.
Build the planning cadence into a repeatable system not a one-off scramble each cycle, with clear inputs, owners, and deadlines.
Own the Corporate Marketing Monthly Report end-to-end gathering inputs across the organization, validating the underlying data, identifying the insights and implications that matter, and translating performance into a concise executive narrative.
Own the operating cadence for marketing scorecards and KPI reporting, including ELT-level reporting cycles, ensuring metrics are consistent, accurate and decision-useful.
Interpret and stress-test the data our analytics team provides.
Translate data into recommendations, not just dashboards connecting marketing performance metrics to business outcomes leadership actually cares about.
Partner with the analytics team as a rigorous internal customer: defining what should be measured, sanity-checking methodology, and ensuring KPIs reported upward are accurate and defensible.
Establish and govern campaign measurement standards including UTM taxonomy, naming conventions, campaign tracking and data hygiene so performance can be measured consistently across channels and over time.
Partner with Integrated Campaigns & Content and Analytics to ensure campaigns are instrumented correctly and measurement is designed upfront, not retrofitted after launch.
Bring hands-on Salesforce and Marketo experience and a strong point of view on marketing systems, lead lifecycle, and campaign infrastructure.
Serve as the person who could stand up or evolve these systems if/when WD adopts them more broadly.
Apply systems-thinking background to how we operate today: process design, tooling evaluation, and marketing operations best practices generally.
Establish and manage the operating cadence for Corporate Marketing connecting annual and semi-annual planning, monthly performance reviews, budget reviews, leadership meetings, scorecards and follow-through into a coherent management rhythm.
Help prioritize and sequence what gets attention across a broad, fast-moving organization, spanning Press & Analyst Relations, Product & Technical Marketing, Integrated Campaigns & Content, Brand Strategy & Experiences, International Marketing, and Marketing Operations.
Prepare materials and talking points for executive and board-level conversations, and help synthesize input from across the function into clear, decision-ready recommendations.
Represent the leader's priorities in cross-functional forums and follow through on action items and commitments across teams.
Take on special projects that don't have a natural home elsewhere - org design questions, process gaps, ad hoc executive requests - and see them through.

Benefits

paid vacation time
paid sick leave
medical/dental/vision insurance
life, accident and disability insurance
tax-advantaged flexible spending and health savings accounts
employee assistance program
other voluntary benefit programs such as supplemental life and AD&D, legal plan, pet insurance, critical illness, accident and hospital indemnity
tuition reimbursement
transit
the Applause Program
employee stock purchase plan
the WD Savings 401(k) Plan