Director, Programmatic

Job description

**Who We Are:** At Digital Matter, we are a next-generation growth and transformation partner built for the realities of today’s market. We combine the pace and precision of a startup with the discipline and rigor of a global advisory firm. Our team brings deep operating experience across media, retail, and technology. We have built, scaled, and transformed organizations. We help consumer brands unlock growth and navigate transformation by managing media as a strategic asset class, connecting data, technology, and creativity to deliver measurable business impact. Our mission is clear: to transform media into a lever for enterprise-level value creation, powered by intelligence, automation, and future-ready technology. Over the past seven years, we’ve guided organizations through IPOs, digital turnarounds, and successful exits, proving that when media is managed as capital, it becomes a catalyst for growth and transformation at scale. ### About the Role As a Director, Programmatic you will lead the strategy, operating model, and financial performance of the organization’s programmatic media investment portfolio. This role is responsible for translating business objectives into disciplined media allocation decisions, ensuring that every dollar of programmatic spend is underwritten, measured, optimized, and governed with institutional rigor. The successful candidate will oversee bidding strategy, inventory quality, supply-path optimization, measurement frameworks, risk controls, and team performance across major programmatic platforms and partners. ### What You'll Do - Serve as the programmatic lead, helping define the team’s mandate, operating model, and standards of excellence - Build, hire, and develop a high-performing team across programmatic trading, ad operations, analytics, and client strategy - Establish scalable processes, documentation, workflows, and decision rights to support a growing portfolio of retail clients - Set the cultural and operational foundation for a disciplined, accountable, and analytically rigorous media investment team - Lead programmatic strategy across a robust portfolio of retail clients, aligning media investment decisions to each client’s commercial objectives - Develop client-specific investment theses across display, video, CTV, audio, DOOH, and emerging channels - Establish allocation frameworks that balance performance, growth, efficiency, and risk across multiple client portfolios - Identify opportunities to expand client relationships through stronger performance, improved measurement, and new media investment opportunities - Own the design and optimization of bidding strategies across DV360, The Trade Desk, Amazon DSP, and other relevant platforms - Partner with product, data science, and engineering teams to help shape the AI trading platform roadmap, ensuring it reflects trader workflows, client needs, and real-world market dynamics - Build supply-path optimization frameworks, including curated marketplaces, direct publisher access, fee transparency, and inventory governance - Define standards for campaign execution, pacing, optimization, brand safety, viewability, invalid traffic prevention, and MFA exclusion - Ensure consistent execution quality across clients while tailoring strategies to category dynamics, margin profiles, and business goals - Partner with analytics, data science, and finance teams to build measurement frameworks across incrementality testing, attribution, MMM, and business outcome reporting - Establish portfolio-level governance, including budget guardrails, concentration thresholds, performance benchmarks, and escalation protocols - Deliver executive-ready reporting on client performance, variance drivers, investment rationale, and forward-looking recommendations - Create a repeatable operating system for assessing what is working, what is underperforming, and where capital should be reallocated across the portfolio ### What You'll Bring - 8+ years of experience in programmatic media, digital investment, or performance marketing, including leadership experience within a trading desk, in-house programmatic function, or media investment organization - Proven track record building and scaling programmatic capabilities within a fast-growing, client-facing environment - Deep hands-on expertise across major DSPs, including DV360, The Trade Desk, Amazon DSP, and retail media ecosystems - Strong understanding of the broader programmatic supply chain, including SSPs, exchanges, identity frameworks, curated marketplaces, and supply-path optimization - Demonstrated ability to develop, optimize, or operationalize bidding strategies, custom algorithms, log-level optimization, and AI-driven decisioning frameworks - Experience leveraging data, automation, and AI platforms to improve media performance, operational efficiency, and portfolio-level outcomes - Strong analytical and measurement capabilities, including incrementality testing, attribution, MMM, and interpreting model outputs to drive business decisions - Financial and commercial acumen, including experience managing media budgets, analyzing unit economics, evaluating ROI, and owning portfolio performance outcomes - Comfortable working cross-functionally with data science, engineering, analytics, finance, strategy, and client leadership teams - Experience building processes, operating models, and governance structures within high-growth or evolving organizations - Proficiency in SQL and familiarity with Python, R, clean rooms, or advanced analytics environments preferred - Background in quantitative finance, trading, retail media, curated marketplaces, or internal media technology/platform development is a strong plus