Director of Marketing Strategy and Operations, Confluent
$231.3-277.6k
+ Equity
Data streaming platform
Posted today
Data streaming platform
1001+ employees
Posted today
$231.3-277.6k
+ Equity
1001+ employees
Company mission
Founded by the team that built Apache Kafka, their mission is to make managing Kafka easy.
Role
Who you are
- This role is ideal for a transformational leader
- The ideal candidate is an expert in defining and leading the execution of strategic marketing planning operations, processes, and frameworks at scale
- Bachelor’s degree plus 8-10+ years experience in marketing, operations, strategic planning, program management, or some combination
- Familiarity with modern marketing and sales technology stacks (SFDC, Tableau, Marketo, Asana)
- A self starter who is intellectually curious
- Strong interpersonal and team building skills; ability to work with a diverse team, influence/drive change across functional and business boundaries, and present to leadership
- Strong business acumen and demonstrated ability to link planning and process gaps, requirements, and desired outcomes to objectives and the defined work required; expert at cross-functional team management, coaching, and mentoring; ability to identify, mitigate, and/or escalate
- Maniacal about “process and planning design,” you’re obsessed with understanding how everything works and translating requests and business processes into insights-based frameworks and solutions
- Strong program and project and change management skills along with the ability to perform in a fast-paced and high-energy environment
What the job involves
- As the Director of Marketing Strategic Planning & Operations, you will be instrumental in shaping our go-to-market (GTM) strategy
- In this role, you will work closely with Marketing and cross-functional teams—including Field, Product and Finance—to drive data-driven insights, strategic planning, and short and long term business strategy
- Your primary mission will be to enhance market alignment, accelerate revenue growth, and ensure that Marketing’s strategy and execution aligns to our overall go-to-market strategy and initiatives to deliver optimal impact across the organization
- You will partner across Marketing to understand our complete set of projects and activities, allocate and prioritize investments and work closely with our Finance and Marketing Strategy and Insights teams to report on what’s driving our KPIs
- You will lead the annual Marketing Planning process and cadences, oversee budget management, and prepare executive and board-level materials, including company retros and QBRs
- You will constantly evaluate ways to optimize and improve our investments and execution processes and lead change management, enablement, and internal communications working with the CMO, Sr Director of Marketing Ops, and Marketing leadership
- Lead partnership and workstreams across Marketing Leadership and with Finance to define and implement a strategic planning framework for Marketing initiatives, including pipegen and progression forecasting, target setting, and resource allocation
- Lead strategic marketing planning and operational excellence programs, including cadences, OKRs & Metrics aligned to company goals, build frameworks for process optimization and investment prioritization
- Use market research and competitive analysis to identify new growth opportunities, customer segments, product positioning and expansion opportunities
- Drive the creation of a clear and actionable Marketing plan in alignment to Confluent’s strategic initiatives
- Lead change management, enablement and internal communications across Marketing and with key stakeholder groups
- Partner with Marketing Program Managers to execute prioritization processes for inter and intra-marketing program management in alignment to Confluent’s strategic initiatives
Our take
Confluent is a commercial company built on top of the open-source Apache Kafka project. Confluent and Kafka have developed a streaming data technology that processes massive amounts of information in real-time.
The streaming database technology was developed at LinkedIn as a way of moving massive amounts of messages. The company decided to open-source that tech in 2011, and Confluent launched as the commercial arm in 2014.
While the base open-source component remains available for free download, it doesn’t include the additional tooling the company has built to make it easier for enterprises to use Kafka. Confluent's value add is in those additional tools, including a cloud version of the product and a marketplace for sharing extensions to the platform.
Confluent expanded strategic partnerships with Microsoft and acquired Immerok, and in 2023 expanded its cloud platform. 2024 saw further product expansions with the launch of the Confluent Migration Accelerator, all exemplifying how the company is living up to its name by rocket-boosting the benefits of Apache Kafka integration for companies.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Apr 2020
$250m
SERIES E
Jan 2019
$125m
SERIES D
Total funding: $455.9m
Company values
- Earn Our Customers' Love - Our customers are the lifeblood of our business and our most important stakeholder. We strive to earn their love with everything we do
- To Build a Great Company, Build a Great Team - We believe that an important part of building a great company is making sure that our employees are the best they can be.
- Smart, Humble, and Empathetic - Our employees appreciate, benefit, and learn from working with other smart, humble, and empathetic people. We strive to hire those who care deeply about others and interact with empathy towards our customers, partners, and employees.
- Be Fired up and Get It Done - As much as we benefit from working with smart, humble, and empathetic employees, we also need to “get it done” to pursue our enormous market opportunity. We are in hyper-growth mode and are scaling to fill the demands of the market and our current and future customers.
- Tasteful not Wasteful - We want to invest in areas that matter the most -- in other words, spend “tastefully,” not wastefully. We believe that thoughtful spending is essential to building a high-quality business.
- One Team - It is critical that we act as and make decisions as a unified company, doing our best to optimize globally rather than locally. This means doing our best to avoid the misalignments that some companies can be prone to. It means recognizing that when employees and teams succeed, Confluent as a whole succeeds.
Company HQ
Mountain View, California
Articles
Leadership
Jay Kreps
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously a Principal Engineer at LinkedIn.
Neha Narkhede
(Co-Founder & Board Member)Previously a Lead Engineer at LinkedIn and Oracle. They are an Investor/advisor for Gem, Block Party, Material Security, Abacus AI, Cortex Data, Yugabyte, Metaphor Data, Natalist, Common Room, and more.
Jun Rao
(Co-Founder)Previously a Senior Engineer at LinkedIn. Has a PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University.
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