Director of Digital and Marketing Technologies

Essential Functions:

• Provides guidance, support, career development and mentoring to their team  of Engineers and Product Mangers to define and evolve the digital and loyalty architecture to ensure scalability over time. 

• Define, deliver and have technical oversight for MarTech products and solutions within this vertical. This role is a technology position that works directly with our Marketing Team.

  • Digital Guest Experience (website, App, ordering site)

  • Customer Data Platform

  • Marketing Automation and Segmentation

  • Loyalty program (loyalty engine)  

  • Off-premise solutions – online ordering

  • Catering

  • Consumer Insight Technology

  • Local Restaurant Marketing platforms

• Champion and drive large strategic and complex projects, with executive visibility and many critical dependencies - Define and build  scorecards to continuously monitor and analyze roadmap durability, backlog health, velocity, quality, throughput, product performance and use this data to drive product improvements.

• Continuously prioritizing a portfolio of programs and projects to drive strategy.

• Pragmatically build a roadmap to delight our Stakeholders and end users. Help them achieve more using our technical capabilities.

• Identify opportunities to eliminate friction and solve customer/end-user problems.

• Create and nurture right partnerships and alliances to expand Red Robin’s product footprint and speed up time-to-market for customers/end users.

• Own the execution of software product development lifecycle and deliverables.

• Orchestrate business priorities while staying in alignment with company vision and goals.

• Working across other technology verticals to ensure alignment on architectural decisions (e.g., infrastructure, data, restaurant technology)

• Staying up to date on emerging technologies; providing direction on which new technologies should be assimilated, integrated, and introduced.

• You will discuss technical implementation details with Product Managers and Engineers and make trade-offs to strike a balance between meeting the customer/end user needs and hitting deadlines and company goals.

• Evangelizes product vision to senior leadership and diverse Stakeholders through deep systems knowledge, customer research, hands-on data analysis, and industry expertise.

Leadership Requirements:

• Be a leader in understanding, testing, and scaling new technologies.

• Responsible for People Management and driving a positive team culture that continually encourages creativity, ownership and accountability.

• Bridges multiple teams together to ensure overall business objectives are being met. This includes within and outside of IT.

• Persuades and influences others through communication skills; must be able to negotiate with external parties/vendors.

• Exercises independence of judgement and autonomy.

• Ability to develop and communicate a Product centric vision that inspires and motivates Team Members.

• Building and maintaining relationships with IT Leaders and Stakeholders to develop a clear understanding of business needs, ensuring cost-effective delivery of IT services to meet those needs, and responding with agility to changing business priorities.

• Identifying and providing feedback through 1:1s, effective use of personal development plans and provision of coaching & development opportunities for all Team Members within direct span of control.

• Understands how to work in an agile environment and know what it takes to iterate quickly. Recognizes this is crucial to the success of the business

• Re-Imagine: Bring new ideas, methods, and approaches to Red Robin and this role.

• Financial Acumen

  • Shares responsibility with VP for budget management (developing and controlling annual budget/cost center) which directly impacts Restaurant Technology.

• Responsible for delivery of end results and resource planning

• Assists with contract management including negotiations with vendors of all levels (large and small).

Qualifications:

• Information Technology; 5-10  years (preferred)

• In-depth knowledge of the following technologies:  

  • Marketing Technologies such as SalesForce, Twilio, etc.

  • eCommerce and Digital technologies

  • Loyalty platforms

  • Software Engineering principles and practices

• The role requires both broad and deep technology knowledge and the ability to provide solutions to a customer’s technical business problem.

• Strong technical acumen; ability to think creatively and strategically to capitalize on unstructured, ambiguous business situations. Willingness and zeal to work in a “hands-on” manner with complex technical challenges.

• Must be able to see the big picture but deliver on details

• Be of unquestionable integrity, ethical and moral character

• Must have technical prowess and can navigate code so that you can best understand the technical limitations of a product

• Use data to make decisions. Have a scrappy, quick method for collecting data and make decisions with imperfect information.

• Advanced relationship management and leadership skills and comfort level communicating with top tier leadership.

• Demonstrated ability to articulate a vision and generate necessary consensus behind business plans; and is results driven and comfortable in driving change in a matrix organization

• Proven success in building a business strategy and presenting innovate solutions to executives and colleagues.

• Extensive experience leading and managing cross-functional teams; exceptional project management skills.

• Proven ability to manage multiple priorities given aggressive timelines, ability to perform in a fast-paced, dynamic and ambiguous business environment, ability to manage internal and external resources.

Benefits:

• Eligible for an annual bonus

• Flexible paid time off and holidays

• Health, vision, dental, life insurance plans, and discounts

• 401(k) savings plan plus a company match with immediate vesting

• Eligible to participate in the employee stock purchase plan after 1 year of continuous employment

• Discounts on Red Robin food