Role Summary
The Associate Director of Audience Ingestion leads a team responsible for onboarding, validating, transforming, and maintaining all Audience data used across the Digital organization. This includes audience files from partners, platforms, identity vendors, and internal stakeholders. The role ensures consistent data quality, reliable ingestion workflows, and scalable processes that support measurement, targeting, activation, and downstream delivery. This position serves as a strategic and operational leader who drives standardization, automation, partner onboarding excellence, and strong alignment with Product, Engineering, GTM, and Delivery teams.
Key Responsibilities
1. Leadership & Team Development
• Lead the Audience Ingestion team responsible for end to end audience data onboarding and recurring ingestion workflows.
• Set goals, performance standards, and KPIs for ingestion analysts and data specialists.
• Develop team capability in SQL, Snowflake, file processing, and data validation.
• Build a culture of accountability, documentation, operational rigor, and continuous improvement.
2. Ownership of Audience Data Onboarding
• Serve as the senior point of contact for audience data ingestion, managing expectations with internal and external stakeholders.
• Oversee intake, scoping, technical requirements, and onboarding of new audience datasets.
• Ensure partners are set up with consistent delivery methods, file formats, metadata, and operational expectations.
• Manage relationships with internal teams responsible for audience data sourcing, delivery requirements, or data transformation needs.
3. Ingestion Workflow Management & Standardization
• Own end to end ingestion workflows including:
o File receipt and validation
o Layout enforcement and schema management
o Audience mapping and crosswalk joins
o Data cleansing, transformation, and readiness checks
• Lead standardization of file formats, naming conventions, delivery schedules, and layout specifications.
• Ensure ingestion processes are optimized for scale, automation, and monitoring.
4. Intake & Operational Governance
• Oversee the intake process for audience ingestion requests using standardized forms and workflows.
• Ensure proper triage, prioritization, and SLA management for incoming ingestion tasks.
• Maintain documentation for ingestion processes, roles, and decisioning.
• Monitor backlog, capacity needs, and operational bottlenecks.
5. Quality Control & Compliance
• Oversee audience data validation and quality checks prior to downstream use.
• Establish QC frameworks that ensure accuracy, completeness, consistency, and metadata compliance.
• Ensure processes comply with privacy and data handling requirements for identity, consumer, and health related data.
• Maintain audit ready documentation for ingestion flows, schemas, and quality controls.
6. Cross Functional Collaboration
• Partner with Product to translate roadmap needs into operational processes and ingestion capabilities.
• Collaborate with Engineering to develop automation, ingestion pipelines, metadata standards, and data transformation logic.
• Work closely with Delivery, GTM, Success, and Client facing teams to ensure audience datasets meet client and operational requirements.
• Participate in cross team discussions around ingestion ownership, process improvements, and resource needs.
7. Strategic Planning & Continuous Improvement
• Develop plans for modernizing ingestion workflows, reducing manual effort, and implementing automation.
• Identify and prioritize tooling, process, and architectural enhancements to support scaling audience ingestion.
• Build operational dashboards and health checks to monitor ingestion success, failures, delays, and data quality.
• Contribute to budgeting and resource planning aligned to team growth and platform expansion.
Qualifications
• 8+ years of experience in data ingestion, data operations, platform operations, or data engineering.
• 3+ years leading technical data teams.
• Strong experience with audience data, identity data, mapping logic, and partner file processes.
• Proficiency with SQL, Snowflake (or similar cloud data platforms), and ETL/ELT workflows.
• Experience onboarding external data sources, managing file specifications, and implementing ingestion standards.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate cross functionally.
• Familiarity with intake, ticketing, or workflow systems (Workfront or similar).
• Understanding of privacy, compliance, and regulated data practices.
The potential base pay range for this role, when annualized, is $84,400.00 - $235,300.00. The actual base pay offered may vary based on a number of factors including job-related qualifications such as knowledge, skills, education, and experience; location; and/or schedule (full or part-time). Dependent on the position offered, incentive plans, bonuses, and/or other forms of compensation may be offered, in addition to a range of health and welfare and/or other benefits.
