Sr. Associate Manager, Digital Customer Data and Engagement Solutions

Yum!•Irvine, CA

2d•$120,000 - $140,000

About The Position

The Sr. Associate Manager, Digital - Customer Data & Engagement Solutions is a senior individual contributor and technical leader within Customer Data & Solutions. The role owns the connection between customer data, identity, decisioning, and activation, translating complex data and engagement requirements into scalable, activation-ready solutions for CRM, lifecycle, loyalty, and personalization use cases. The position is accountable for solution direction, data readiness, and activation patterns. It partners with Data Engineering, Middleware, Analytics, Lifecycle, Loyalty, Product, and agency/platform teams to identify gaps, establish repeatable patterns, and move work from ambiguous requests to reliable production capabilities. The role may manage 1–2 direct reports, depending on team needs and operating model.

Requirements

8+ years of experience in customer data, marketing technology, CRM/lifecycle, digital solutions architecture, or related enterprise technology environments.
Hands-on experience with customer engagement platforms, with Braze preferred, and ability to connect data, segmentation, orchestration, and channel execution.
Strong working knowledge of CDP/customer data architecture, data modeling, SQL, data quality, event schemas, APIs/middleware, identity resolution, consent, and data governance.
Experience designing or troubleshooting data flows across warehouse/CDP, activation platforms, and downstream measurement or decisioning environments.
Ability to evaluate data readiness and feasibility, identify the appropriate owner, and distinguish scalable product/platform solutions from one-off implementations.
Experience supporting personalization, experimentation, AI decisioning, or automation workflows and translating outputs into activation-ready solutions.
Proven ability to independently lead multiple concurrent initiatives in a fast-paced, cross-functional enterprise environment.
Strong communication, influence, and documentation skills, including the ability to simplify complex technical topics for business and technical audiences.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business, Marketing, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Snowflake, Hightouch, Adobe Experience Platform, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Tealium, AWS, Redshift, or comparable CDP/customer data ecosystems.
Experience with loyalty, offer, or identity platforms and cross-system customer data integrations.
Experience establishing activation governance, QA frameworks, operating models, or reusable solution patterns in a complex enterprise environment.

Responsibilities

Lead the solution approach for customer data used in CRM and digital engagement, including customer signals, attributes, events, audience inputs, identity mappings, consent, and downstream activation requirements.
Assess source of truth, data type, coverage, timeliness, grain, and one-to-one mapping before data is operationalized for activation, partnering with data owners to validate assumptions.
Define repeatable activation patterns for moving trusted data through CDP/warehouse, Braze, and related platforms.
Identify data quality, schema, identity, latency, and integration gaps; coordinate resolution with owning teams and escalate when decisions or tradeoffs are required.
Own technical solution design for CRM, lifecycle, loyalty, personalization, and experimentation workflows across email, push, in-app, SMS, and offer constructs.
Define reusable activation patterns, segmentation approaches, orchestration standards, QA/release controls, and implementation guardrails.
Serve as a senior technical authority for engagement solution design and activation, balancing scalable architecture with practical delivery needs.
Guide complex or non-standard campaign designs and serve as an escalation point for decisions crossing data, platform, and channel boundaries.
Partner with Data Engineering, Middleware, Analytics, and platform teams on APIs, webhooks, event schemas, data contracts, identity resolution, consent, and operational data flows.
Validate whether existing workflows and platform capabilities can support requirements before recommending new pipelines, custom events, or new architecture.
Use data and technical analysis to diagnose issues, identify the appropriate owner, and distinguish activation work from deeper analytics or data-science needs.
Own or shape the CDS operating model for BAU activation, including intake, complexity triage, review triggers, QA/release readiness, launch validation, and post-launch learnings.
Create clear ownership and escalation paths across CDS, Lifecycle, Loyalty, Data, Analytics, Engineering, and agency/platform partners.
Identify opportunities to simplify, automate, standardize, or shift work to the appropriate operating team.
Translate AI decisioning outputs, recommendations, scores, and dynamic content into activation-ready customer data and orchestration patterns.
Partner on Braze AI Decisioning and agentic workflows with appropriate controls, monitoring, human-in-the-loop review, and operational guardrails.
Prioritize AI and automation opportunities built on stable data and reusable activation patterns.
Lead through influence across Product Management, Data Engineering, Middleware, Analytics/BI, Lifecycle Marketing, Loyalty, Engineering, and agency/platform partners.
Communicate recommendations, tradeoffs, risks, and decisions; explain complex data and architecture topics to technical and non-technical stakeholders; and create durable documentation.
Mentor junior team members and build technical capability through playbooks, reusable patterns, documentation, and knowledge sharing.
Establish standards that reduce dependency on individual knowledge and improve team resilience.