Senior Director – Marketing Technology
JCPenney
Dallas, Texas
Senior Director – Marketing Technology
The Senior Director – Marketing Technology will lead the engineering team responsible for building and scaling the next generation of marketing technology at Catalyst Brands. This leader will combine forward-looking vision in AI-driven personalization, experimentation, and customer data strategy with operational excellence in Agile delivery, engineering discipline, and platform scalability. The role requires deep collaboration with data engineering and data science teams, as well as with marketing stakeholders, to transform business goals into reliable, data-driven customer experiences.
Primary Responsibilities
• Champion the Agile SDLC across the organization, serving as both a coach and a practitioner. Outcomes: consistent, predictable, and high-quality delivery.
• Lead the design and development of web-scale, cloud-native marketing platforms. Outcomes: high performance, resilience, and scalability.
• Partner with data engineering and data science teams to enable advanced analytics, personalization, and machine learning use cases across CRM, CDPs, ESPs, DAMs, and identity management. Outcomes: improved customer match rates, faster delivery of marketing campaigns, increased sales due to personalization.
• Drive a culture of experimentation and innovation, including AI and automation. Outcomes: higher customer engagement and improved marketing effectiveness.
• Establish and continuously evolve engineering practices in test automation, CI/CD, DevSecOps, monitoring, and incident response. Outcomes: Improved delivery quality metrics, improved MTTR.
• Manage global engineering teams, recruiting and developing talent, fostering innovation, accountability, and career growth. Outcomes: Reduced attrition, improved employee engagement metrics.
• Communicate program status, risks, and opportunities to senior leadership, ensuring transparency and alignment with business goals. Outcomes: better on-time delivery, fewer scope revisions.
• Ensure high-quality documentation and compliance with engineering, security, and regulatory standards. Outcomes: reduced financial impact due to security breaches.
Decision Rights
• This role will decide how agreed functionality is designed and built, with guidance from enterprise architecture and the business.
• Tradeoffs, when necessary, to deliver according to agreed budget and scope.
• Career progression for employees within the MarTech engineering organization.
• Engineering process design and implementation with MarTech engineering.
Key Success Metrics
• Delivery success for a $15-$20m portfolio
• Budget utilization
• Employee satisfaction
• Software and delivery quality
• Customer match rates
• Business partner satisfaction
Core Competencies & Accomplishments
• Proven expertise in Agile software development lifecycles (Scrum, SAFe, Kanban), with experience coaching teams and scaling Agile practices across large organizations.
• Demonstrated ability to deliver enterprise-scale and web-scale software platforms, leveraging microservices, APIs, event-driven architectures, and modern cloud technologies.
• Strong partnership with data engineering and data science; ability to translate marketing needs into platform features that enable advanced analytics and AI-driven experiences.
• Demonstrated skill in data engineering, data analysis and statistical reasoning.
• Visionary leadership in AI, personalization, experimentation platforms, and marketing automation, with proven results in delivering forward-looking capabilities.
• Operational excellence in managing distributed engineering teams, including resource planning, performance management, and vendor/contractor oversight.
• Deep knowledge of CRM, CDPs, ESPs (e.g., Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Attentive), DAMs, and identity management systems.
• Success scaling high-performance engineering teams while balancing innovation and delivery discipline.
• Strong communication and leadership skills, with the ability to influence in cross-functional, matrixed environments.
• Bachelor’s degree in STEM; master’s preferred.
• 10+ years of experience in MarTech, data-driven platforms, or adjacent software engineering leadership roles.
About the Company
JCPenney
We share a passion for serving customers, supporting our communities and making JCPenney the best retailer for all families. As a Company founded on the Golden Rule, our success is rooted in the belief that we treat everyone the way we would want to be treated. Working at JCPenney means joining a dedicated team of associates who are encouraged to be uniquely themselves in a collaborative and inclusive environment. After all, JCPenney is more than a destination for style and value, it’s a place where careers prosper, accomplishments are celebrated and diversity flourishes. It’s a place that’s meant for you.
JCPenney emerged more than 100 years ago as a small mercantile store serving families on the American frontier in the Old West. Today, we’re still pioneering new frontiers by challenging the old rules of retail and creating a shopping experience that merges the intimacy of a traditional store with the digital conveniences of personal technology.
Today, JCPenney is one of the nation’s largest apparel and home retailers with over 860 stores across the United States and Puerto Rico, and a powerful e-commerce site, jcp.com. The retail landscape is more competitive than ever, creating new opportunities to differentiate and streamline our business. With 98,000 hard-working associates around the globe, we have the talent and determination to succeed and be the best retailer for American families.