Program Director Jobs

About The Position

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Marketing, Business, Communications, Data Science, or a related field.
• 10+ years in marketing, brand, digital, SEO, or channel strategy, with accountability for full-funnel, cross-channel plans spanning earned, owned, paid, and social.
• Experience and deep fluency in SEO, AI search, or generative search strategy.
• Experience owning KPIs for programs delivered through multiple teams that the role does not directly manage, and driving results.
• Experience building annual and multi-year strategies for multiple businesses or product lines, ideally in a way that unifies an enterprise brand.
• Experience working with measurement teams to define frameworks and metrics, including for upper-funnel or hard-to-attribute impact.
• Experience designing and leading original research and turning findings into strategy.
• Applied experience with AI and emerging platforms in a marketing or discovery context.
• Ability to connect earned, owned, paid, and social strategies into one plan and make tradeoffs across channels and funnel stages.
• Ability to set KPIs and hold cross-functional teams accountable through influence rather than direct authority.
• Understanding of how AI platforms form answers and what sources influence them, sufficient to set strategy and challenge vendor claims.
• Ability to define measurement approaches for new channels where standard metrics do not yet exist.
• Ability to design research and experiments that produce evidence leaders can act on.
• Ability to direct specialists and channel teams while maintaining a strategic view.
• Clear communication with executive, business, and working-level audiences; comfort with ambiguity and skepticism toward hype.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree.
• Experience in insurance, financial services, or another regulated industry.
• Experience with public relations, earned media, or social strategy.
• Familiarity with structured data, content architecture, headless content, and adtech or martech platforms.

Responsibilities

• Drive the cross-channel plan across earned, owned, and paid, covering the full funnel, including upper-funnel presence in AI platforms.
• Build in-year and multi-year strategies for key businesses and audiences, and set priorities and tradeoffs with and across channel teams.
• Establish enterprise KPIs, align channel teams to deliver against them, report progress to senior leaders, and adjust plans based on results.
• Define AI-driven acquisition strategies using AI search, AI-mediated discovery, and AI-enabled channels to generate and capture demand across product lines and audiences.
• Partner with Experience Design and voice-of-customer teams to map AI-influenced acquisition journeys and identify AI touchpoints that can lead people to New York Life.
• Work with Analytics and other teams to establish measurement frameworks for AI search presence and AI’s contribution to acquisition, including attribution across AI-mediated touchpoints.
• Ensure consistent representation of New York Life across channels and businesses, including how AI platforms describe and recommend the company.
• Set strategy and shared standards to align channel and delivery teams, including SEO and AI Search, PR, social, paid, dotcom, and content, and ensure initiatives align with the strategy.
• Align strategies for structured data, schema markup, and content architecture to improve how AI systems ingest, index, and cite New York Life content.
• Evaluate and recommend approaches to knowledge graphs, entity resolution, and semantic content modeling with SEO, Enablement, Technology, Data, and Product.
• Collaborate with Product, Marketing Operations, and Enablement to support modernization to headless content.
• Lead future-state visioning for AI-mediated acquisition and marketing, defining AI-first discovery, engagement, and demand models.
• Commission quantitative, qualitative, and other original research on how people use AI to research and choose financial services and how competitors are represented.
• Structure and partner on experiments with clear hypotheses, use results to identify effective AI acquisition and marketing models, and shift investment accordingly.
• Develop new artifacts to make AI-mediated demand visible and measurable, such as competitive representation maps and AI acquisition attribution visualizations.
• Partner with Experience Design and AI Experience Product Management to apply discovery insights to journeys, capabilities, and roadmaps.
• Work with Compliance, Legal, and Technology to incorporate regulatory and risk requirements into the plan.

Benefits

• Full package of employee benefits.
• Leave programs.
• Adoption assistance.
• Student loan repayment programs.
• Annual discretionary bonus; employees may also be eligible to participate in an incentive program.