Director, Martech Platform (Adobe) -… at Best Western… · Surprise

Join BWH Hotels – Where Passion Meets Purpose

At BWH® Hotels, we don't just offer employment opportunities, we create opportunities to be part of something extraordinary. As a global leader in hospitality for nearly 80 years, our vision is to inspire travel through unique experiences. Joining our corporate team means becoming part of a dynamic and inclusive community that values innovation, collaboration, and making a meaningful impact in the travel industry.

Headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, BWH Hotels boasts a powerful portfolio of 18 brands, including WorldHotels™, Best Western® Hotels & Resorts, and SureStay Hotels®, with approximately 4,300 hotels in over 100 countries. We take pride in our top-ranking employee engagement scores and foster a workplace culture where your contributions truly matter. Join us and be part of a team that's shaping the future of hospitality!

Job Purpose

This is a unique opportunity to deliver a marketing technology platform from the ground up leveraging best in class technology, well prepared enterprise data, and AI driven intelligence and automation at every level. Work with aligned and engaged stakeholders and teams across our business. You’ll be at the center of our success, making a critical contribution and driving an outsized impact on our brands, and our guests.

As Director, Martech Platform, you will own the strategy, roadmap, and architectural direction of our martech stack anchored in Adobe Experience Cloud including Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), Real-Time CDP, Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO), and Customer Journey Analytics (CJA).

Partnering with the VP, Customer Facing Technology, you will define how the platform evolves, integrates with our broader digital ecosystem, and enables Marketing, eCommerce, and our agency partners to deliver personalization at scale to consistently welcome and engage our guests. Acting as the solution architect for our martech stack, you’ll partner cross-functionally with product, engineering, data services, loyalty applications, enterprise architecture, cybersecurity, legal, and GRC to deliver compliant, reliable, and impactful solutions that drive business outcomes.

Your initial focus will be guiding the execution of our Adobe implementation (led by our SI partner), establishing a personalization managed services operating model, and building the internal Martech Platform team that will support operation, adoption and use of the platform. You will own our partner and vendor relationships and ensure we emerge from implementation with a stable, well-governed platform and a clear path to internal ownership.

Key Responsibilities

Platform Strategy, Backlog & Roadmap

• Define a multi-year Martech Platform roadmap aligned with our strategic vision to scale personalization use cases, establish a strong content-supply chain, and drive cross-channel content reuse, AI-driven automation, and data driven customer journey orchestration
• Serve as a trusted technology advisor to business and technology leadership
• Present architecture recommendations, trade-offs, risks, and options to senior and executive stakeholders
• Communicate complex technical topics in clear business terms — connecting architecture decisions to reliability, scalability, cost, guest/member experience, and strategic flexibility
• Translate business objectives and product priorities into architectural direction, technical enablers, and a runway that keeps future features deliverable
• Aid roadmap planning by estimating and sizing the effort, complexity, and dependencies of features and initiatives, and by identifying the technical enablers required before delivery
• Evaluate emerging technologies, platform extensions, and new tools — making build/buy/partner recommendations grounded in business value

Martech Team & Technical Leadership

• Manage a cross-function team responsible for the platform’s technical architecture, integrations, data collection, data engineering, governance, and administration
• Define the team’s career development framework and foster a culture of innovation, agility, continuous improvement
• Lead solution architect for the Martech stack — work with the team to define integration patterns, data flow architecture, dependencies, and platform standards across a complex digital ecosystem
• Partner with the product managers as the technical counterpart — jointly shaping the solution vision, roadmap, and sequencing of work
• Collaborate with enterprise architecture and engineering leaders to define standardized processes for personalization use case intake, requirements definition, solution design, implementation, and measurement
• Ensure platform designs, vendor integrations, and system configurations comply with enterprise architecture standards, cybersecurity requirements, and data privacy policies while balancing performance, reliability, security, privacy, compliance, supportability, and total cost of ownership
• Contribute to architecture governance — design standards, review forums, sign-off processes, and decision documentation
• Partner with content and creative teams to scale the content supply chain — optimizing content creation, reuse, and delivery to support personalization
• Provide technical guidance and quality oversight to SI partners and managed services teams

Privacy and Compliance Governance

• Built trusted, collaborative relationships with and serve as the primary technology liaison to Cybersecurity, GRC, Legal and Privacy on martech matters
• Own consent and preference management configuration, and data-privacy obligations (e.g. CCPA/GDPR) across the platform
• Contribute to defining data governance policies, DULE labeling and attribute-based access control (ABAC) design and ensure proper configuration and enforcement throughout the platform
• Contribute to privacy and compliance documentation, reviews and support GRC auditing and reporting

Budget, Vendor & Partner Management

• Manage the Martech Platform budget — including software licensing, volume consumption controls, SI and managed services contracts, infrastructure, and team personnel costs; develop annual budget plans and maintain accountability for spend vs. plan
• Own relationships with key platform vendors including Adobe, OneTrust, Cloudflare, Twilio SendGrid, Google, and AWS, as well as agency, SI and managed services partners
• Manage engagement scope, SOW deliverables, knowledge transfer, and transition planning from implementation to a balance of managed services and internal ownership
• Drive accountability and quality from external partners; escalate and resolve issues proactively

Platform Enablement & Adoption

• Champion platform adoption across Marketing, eCommerce, and product engineering teams. Define what “good” adoption looks like and drive accountability to achieve it
• Define and track KPIs for platform adoption, business impact, and time-to-value. Establishing clear metrics that demonstrate the platform’s contribution to revenue growth, conversion, and customer lifetime value
• Design and manage a formal training and enablement program. Measure adoption rates, proficiency levels, and platform utilization against defined targets
• Contribute to organizational change management as we create balance between agency or managed services-dependent operations to an internally owned platform capability
• Define the operating model for how internal teams, agencies, and managed services interact with and consume the platform
• Develop enablement frameworks, documentation standards, and onboarding resources for all platform user groups

Key Outcomes

• Personalization delivered at scale across channels on a well-governed platform
• A unified, compliant customer identity and data foundation
• A stable, standards-based platform with a clear path to internal ownership

Preferred Experience and Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 10+ years of martech, digital marketing technology, marketing operations, or digital experience platform roles, with a meaningful track record of technology platform implementation, strategy and leadership
• Deep, hands-on experience with the Adobe Experience Cloud ecosystem — specifically AEP, Real-Time CDP, AJO, CJA with Content Analytics, in addition to Adobe Experience Manager Sites and Assets, Dynamic Media, Adobe Target, and Workfront — gained through implementation or architecture ownership (not just tool usage)
• Proven ability to transition from hands-on technical execution to platform strategy, architecture, and team leadership
• Deep understanding of identity resolution strategy — including cross-device identity stitching, identity namespace design, merge policy governance, and authenticated vs. unauthenticated profile management within AEP
• Solid understanding of data governance, privacy regulation (CCPA/GDPR), consent management, and the compliance obligations that apply to martech data
• Demonstrated change management experience — designing enablement programs, driving adoption across diverse user groups, and measuring organizational readiness and platform utilization
• Experience managing complex SI partner and managed services relationships, including SOW oversight, budget accountability, and knowledge transfer
• Experience architecting across applications, cloud platforms, APIs, integrations, data flows, identity, and security domains
• Strong understanding of modern integration patterns — APIs, microservices, event-driven architecture, and service orchestration
• Experience partnering with product managers and helping estimate and plan roadmap work
• Exceptional stakeholder communication — equally fluent presenting to C-suite executives and working through business requirements with product teams and technical solutions with architects and engineering teams

Required Knowledge and Skills

• Experience building or leading a martech platform team from the ground up
• Direct implementation experience with Adobe Experience Platform, Real-Time CDP, AJO, and CJA
• One or more Adobe certifications: Adobe Certified Multi-Solution Architect, AEP Foundations, AEP Architect, AEP Data Engineer, Real-Time CDP Developer, or AJO Developer / Practitioner
• Experience with PCI DSS, GDPR, PII handling, and compliance-relevant data flows
• Experience with OneTrust or similar consent and preference management platforms
• Hospitality, travel, or consumer brand experience
• Experience defining operating models for martech platforms serving marketing, eCommerce, and agency teams

Work Location and Schedule

• This is a hybrid position, requiring onsite presence Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at our Global Operations Center, with the option to work remote on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This hybrid model fosters intentional collaboration, teamwork, connection, and productivity, while still providing flexibility and work life balance. The office address is 20400 N 29th Avenue, Phoenix, Arizona 85027.

This position is not eligible for immigration sponsorship.

Benefits Summary****for Full-Time Employees

· Medical/Dental/Vision available day one

· Vacation/Sick- accruals start day one

· Paid company holidays and personal holidays to celebrate what’s important to you

· 401K - company contribution and match (U.S.)

· Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) – company contribution and match (Canada)

· Employee discounts/hotel discounts

· Free financial and health wellness programs

· Tuition Reimbursement

Equal Employment Opportunity

BWH Hotels (the "Company") maintains a policy of equal employment opportunity for all employees and qualified applicants for employment without regard to race (including hair textures and hair styles associated with race), color or pigmentation, religion, religious creed (including religious dress and grooming practices), national origin, ancestry, alienage or citizenship status, caste, age, disability, gender, gender identity or expression, sex, sexual orientation, LGBTQIA+ individuals, height, weight, pregnancy status, childbirth or related medical conditions, genetic information, uniformed service or veteran status, marital status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, provincial, or local laws. The Company’s equal employment opportunity policy applies to all aspects of employment with the Company, including, but not limited to, hiring, promotion, transfer, benefits, discipline, and termination.