Senior Manager, Marketing Operations
WD is building the infrastructure behind the AI-driven data economy.
As AI scales, so does data. Every interaction, every model, every system generates data that must be stored, managed, and made accessible over time. That’s where we come in.
We combine deep engineering expertise with global-scale manufacturing to deliver the storage systems that make AI possible, powering hyperscale data centers, cloud platforms, and enterprise infrastructure worldwide.
This isn’t theoretical work. It’s real systems, at real scale, people solving some of the hardest challenges in technology today.
We’re looking for people who want to build, solve, and operate at that level.
Join us and let’s shape the future of data.
About the Role
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.
What You'll Do
1. Own Budget & Financial Stewardship
- 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.
2. Drive Semi-Annual Planning
- 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.
3. Bring Rigor to Analytics & Insight
- 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. You won't be pulling the reports yourself, but you need to understand them well enough to catch what's wrong, ask the hard questions, and push back when something doesn't add up.
- 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.
4. Build Marketing Operations Infrastructure & Systems Readiness
- 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. This isn't a day-one need, but we want that capability on the team so we're not starting from zero when the moment comes.
- In the meantime, apply that systems-thinking background to how we operate today: process design, tooling evaluation, and marketing operations best practices generally.
5. Act as Chief of Staff to the Function Leader
- 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.
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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.
What Success Looks Like
- Budget is accurate, current, and defensible, no surprises at quarter-end.
- The semi-annual planning process runs on a system, not heroics, and produces a plan leadership trusts.
- Data reported upward is accurate, and leadership trusts this person's read on what the numbers actually mean.
- The marketing organization operates with more discipline and less ad hoc scrambling than it did a year prior.
- This person is trusted with ambiguity, handed a loosely defined problem and expected to structure it, not asked to wait for instructions.
What We're Looking For
Must-Have Experience
- 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.
Core Capabilities
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.
What Sets You Apart
- 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.
All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.
WD is committed to providing equal opportunities to all applicants and employees and will not discriminate against any applicant or employee based on their race, color, ancestry, religion (including religious dress and grooming standards), sex (including pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions, breastfeeding or related medical conditions), gender (including a person’s gender identity, gender expression, and gender-related appearance and behavior, whether or not stereotypically associated with the person’s assigned sex at birth), age, national origin, sexual orientation, medical condition, marital status (including domestic partnership status), physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, protected medical and family care leave, Civil Air Patrol status, military and veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics. We also prohibit harassment of any individual on any of the characteristics listed above. Our non-discrimination policy applies to all aspects of employment. We comply with the laws and regulations set forth in the "Know Your...