Senior Director, CRM

Yahoo serves as a trusted guide for hundreds of millions of people globally, helping them achieve their goals online through our portfolio of iconic products. For advertisers, Yahoo Advertising offers omnichannel solutions and powerful data to engage with our brands and deliver results.

A Little About Us

The Yahoo CRM team owns the channels through which Yahoo talks to its users - email, push, SMS, newsletters, and emerging messaging surfaces across Yahoo Mail, Sports, Finance, News, Search, Weather, Games, and more. We decide how programs show up: in which vehicle, at what moment, at what frequency, and in what form. Our work spans marketing, lifecycle, behavioral, transactional, service, and compliance communications, and it reaches hundreds of millions of people.

CRM is one of Yahoo's largest owned channels, and we run it as a performance channel and a product capability.

About the Role

The Sr. Director, CRM leads Yahoo's centralized CRM organization and owns the performance of the channel portfolio - the engagement, retention, and revenue it drives, the quality of every message that reaches a user, and the efficiency with which the organization delivers it.

This role owns channel strategy. Demand reaches CRM from many directions - lifecycle priorities from Customer Strategy, launches and campaigns from Product Marketing, strategic requests from business and product leaders, and compliance, service, and transactional requirements. Each arrives with an objective and an intended audience.

You own everything downstream: how that objective becomes a program, which vehicle carries it, how it is paced and sequenced against everything else competing for the same user, how it is measured, and how it gets better. When demand exceeds what the channel can absorb, you make the call.

The organization spans three mandates. CRM Channel Strategy sets the role of each vehicle, the architecture of every program, contact and cadence strategy across the portfolio, and the optimization agenda. CRM Operations turns those designs into technically sound, quality-assured communications at scale. CRM Innovation advances the automation, personalization, and AI-enabled capabilities that expand what the channels can do.

You will carry explicit scale, quality, and efficiency targets, serve as Yahoo's senior CRM voice into Product and Engineering, and partner closely with Customer Strategy, Product Marketing, Analytics, Creative, Legal, Privacy, Localization, and Messaging Platforms.

Responsibilities

• Own Yahoo's CRM channel performance end to end, setting and delivering against explicit scale, quality, and efficiency targets - reach and message volume, engagement and retention contribution, deliverability and defect rates, and cost and cycle time per program.
• Set the multi-year vision and annual roadmap for the CRM organization, and lead and develop the senior leaders running Channel Strategy, Operations, and Innovation.
• Define the role of each vehicle in the portfolio - email, push, SMS, newsletters, in-product messaging, and emerging surfaces - including what each is best suited to carry, how they orchestrate together, and where fallback and suppression logic applies.
• Own how programs come to life, whether they originate as a lifecycle priority from Customer Strategy, a launch or campaign from Product Marketing, a strategic request from a business or product leader, or a compliance, service, or transactional requirement. In every case you translate the objective and intended audience into a working program - the program architecture (always-on versus campaign, triggered versus scheduled, promotional versus service), the segment and trigger logic that puts the right user in the right flow, entry and exit criteria, cadence and sequencing, and the dynamic content and data plumbing that render personalization in-channel.
• Own contact strategy and channel governance: frequency caps, prioritization and conflict resolution when multiple products target the same user, eligibility and suppression rules, and the channel calendar.
• Own the optimization agenda, directing testing across messaging, creative, send time, cadence, sequencing, audience construction, channel mix, and dynamic content, and codifying what works into standards rather than leaving it in individual campaigns.
• Oversee execution across all CRM-managed communications and maintain the operating standards that make it repeatable - intake, SLAs, quality assurance, change control, deployment protocols, and escalation - while driving the efficiency gains that come from modularization, templating, and automation.
• Serve as the formal CRM partner to Product and Engineering leadership, co-owning roadmap commitments for customer events, triggers, APIs, data feeds, audience creation, platform integrations, and real-time messaging.
• Own the CRM innovation agenda, incubating and scaling AI-enabled personalization, generative content production, predictive audience and send-time models, automated quality assurance, and new messaging surfaces, with a clear path from experiment to production standard.
• Partner with Analytics and Data Science to define channel measurement frameworks, program and vehicle-level KPIs, incrementally and experimentation roadmaps, and the insight loops that tell the organization what to scale and what to stop.
• Set standards for deliverability, channel health, data integrity, consent, segmentation, and sender reputation; ensure communications meet brand, accessibility, privacy, localization, and legal requirements with the teams accountable for those inputs; and lead the CRM response to communication incidents.
• Manage the CRM budget, staffing plan, platform and vendor strategy, and resource priorities, and communicate channel performance, risks, and trade-offs directly to senior leadership.
• Basic Qualifications
• 12+ years of experience in CRM, lifecycle marketing, retention, marketing operations, or customer engagement, including substantial experience leading leaders and multidisciplinary teams.
• Demonstrated accountability for the performance of an owned channel or channel portfolio at consumer scale - setting targets, forecasting outcomes, and delivering measurable engagement, retention, or revenue results.
• Proven success owning channel strategy in a high-volume organization: defining the role of each vehicle, designing program architecture, and setting contact, cadence, and prioritization strategy across competing business demands.
• Experience leading campaign operations alongside strategy - technical execution, quality assurance, and optimization - across multiple products, business units, or international markets through a centralized operating model.
• Deep knowledge of email, push notifications, SMS, newsletters, triggered journeys, transactional messaging, audience segmentation, personalization, experimentation, and marketing automation.
• Strong command of CRM platforms and technical ecosystems - event-based triggers, APIs, payloads, audience data, dynamic content, and platform integrations — with experience across enterprise platforms such as Zeta, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Epsilon, Movable Ink, or comparable solutions, and experience influencing Product and Engineering roadmaps for shared capabilities.
• Demonstrated ability to establish governance, improve production efficiency, and manage operational risk, including leading initiatives such as platform migrations, automation programs, operating-model redesigns, or personalization programs, with working knowledge of deliverability, consent management, and privacy regulations such as CAN-SPAM and GDPR.
• Proven experience defining measurement frameworks and using channel performance data to guide optimization, prioritization, and investment decisions.
• Ability to influence senior and executive stakeholders and drive alignment across Product, Marketing, Engineering, Analytics, and Legal, with excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Business, Communications, Management Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Embrace AI as a core capability to incorporate into their day-to-day workflows. From drafting to analysis and automation, we're building a team that uses AI to accelerate execution and enhance outcomes through the effective use of AI.
• Judgment over automation. AI fluency here means knowing when, where, and how AI should be used. We value strategic thinkers who can distinguish between what AI should accelerate and what requires human creativity, nuance, and accountability.
• Contribute to a culture of learning and innovation by experimenting with AI-enabled approaches, sharing best practices, and helping advance AI adoption across the Marketing organization.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience within a large-scale consumer technology, media, subscription, or digital content organization, including managing communications across multiple brands, languages, and global markets.
• Track record of applying generative AI, predictive analytics, or machine learning to channel strategy, personalization, content production, or quality assurance - and scaling those capabilities beyond pilot.
• Experience launching or incubating a new messaging channel or surface from concept through production.
• Familiarity with HTML, CSS, dynamic content, scripting, email authentication, and technical email-production best practices.
• Experience overseeing both discretionary marketing and transactional or service-related communications, and owning budget and vendor negotiations for enterprise marketing technology.
• Why Yahoo

This role defines how Yahoo shows up in its users' inboxes, notifications, and messages - and how much that portfolio returns to the business. As Sr. Director, CRM, you will own one of Yahoo's largest owned channels: its performance, its standards, and its future, shaping decisions across Product, Marketing, Engineering, and Analytics along the way.

The material job duties and responsibilities of this role include those listed above as well as adhering to Yahoo policies ; exercising sound judgment ; working effectively, safely and inclusively with others ; exhibiting trustworthiness and meeting expectations ; and safeguarding business operations and brand integrity.

At Yahoo, we offer flexible hybrid work options that our employees love! While most roles don’t require regular office attendance, you may occasionally be asked to attend in-person events or team sessions. You’ll always get notice to make arrangements. Your recruiter will let you know if a specific job requires regular attendance at a Yahoo office or facility. If you have any questions about how this applies to the role, just ask the recruiter!

Yahoo is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to, and will not be discriminated against based on age, race, gender, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability or any other protected category. Yahoo will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law.

Yahoo is dedicated to providing an accessible environment for all candidates during the application process and for employees during their employment. If you need accessibility assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability, please submit a request via the Accommodation Request Form ( www.yahooinc.com/careers/contact-us.html ) or call +1.866.772.3182 . Requests and calls received for non-disability related issues, such as following up on an application, will not receive a response.

We believe that a diverse and inclusive workplace strengthens Yahoo and deepens our relationships. When you support everyone to be their best selves, they spark discovery, innovation and creativity. Among other efforts, our 11 employee resource groups (ERGs) enhance a culture of belonging with programs, events and fellowship that help educate, support and create a workplace where all feel welcome.

The compensation for this position ranges from $143,080.00 - $311,150.00/yr and will vary depending on factors such as your location, skills and experience.The compensation package may also include incentive compensation opportunities in the form of discretionary annual bonus or commissions, in addition to equity incentives. Our comprehensive benefits include healthcare, a great 401k, backup childcare, education stipends and much (much) more.

Currently work for Yahoo? Please apply on our internal career site.