About the position
Major League Soccer's Strategy and Business Intelligence group is tasked with supporting strategic decision making and resource allocation across the League - with a focus on driving fan growth, revenue capture, and operating efficiencies - by providing impactful data driven insights, analysis, and recommendations. The group is seeking a Sr. Director to oversee the Marketing & Product analytics vertical. This position will use fan, marketing, and product data to analyze, model, and drive strategic recommendations that support marketing and owned and operated platforms. The ideal candidate will be responsible for leveraging data-driven insights to enhance fan engagement, optimize marketing strategies, and contribute to the overall growth, revenue and success of the League. This hire will report into the Vice President of Strategy & BI and is highly curious and analytical, able to distill clarity from complexity, and has an entrepreneurial desire to innovate.
Responsibilities
- Lead a team of analytics professionals to deliver actionable insights that inform MLS' marketing strategies and enhance engagement and retention on owned platforms.
- Build out the Marketing Analytics function from the ground up, creating a key capability to optimize our marketing strategies.
- Design and implement data-driven segmentation models and fan personas to support personalized and effective marketing campaigns, including paid targeting.
- Assess the performance of paid marketing and CRM initiatives to optimize return on investment (ROI) and deepen fan engagement.
- Develop advanced analytics tools, including attribution models and media mix modeling (MMM), to guide campaign planning and performance measurement.
- Design and evaluate tests, such as A/B testing and match market experiments, to optimize future campaign strategies and outcomes.
- Enhance fan communication strategies by enriching fan profiles with predictive models, including propensity and next-best-action frameworks.
- Conduct analyses of user journeys and platform performance across the MLS website and app to identify opportunities for improving fan experiences and boosting conversion rates.
- Analyze content performance across platforms to identify trends, optimize engagement, and inform future content strategies.
- Collaborate with Marketing, Product, and Technology teams to embed data-driven insights into strategic decision-making and operational processes.
- Support broader League objectives with additional ad-hoc organizational analytics projects.
- Additional responsibilities as assigned.
Requirements
- Bachelor's Degree in STEM field including Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics, Marketing Analytics, or similar domain required.
- 10+ years of experience required, with 6+ years of experience in quantitative analysis role in marketing analytics, CRM, etc.
- Strong proficiency in statistical modeling, machine learning, and data visualization techniques for supervised and unsupervised learning including methods for Classification, Regression, Forecasting, and Clustering (Regression, Neural Networks, Decision Trees, Random Forests, KMeans, etc.)
- Deep hands-on experience in Python, SQL, and a visualization tool (Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, etc.)
- Deep hands-on experience with CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, and fan analytics.
- Ability to translate business challenges into quantitative problems and clearly communicate findings and solutions.
- Strong interpersonal skills and ability to effectively communicate to a wide range of audiences, both written and verbally.
- High-level of commitment to a quality work product and organizational ethics, integrity and compliance.
- Ability to work effectively in a fast paced, team environment.
- Demonstrated decision making and problem-solving skills.
- High attention to detail with the ability to multi-task and meet deadlines with minimal supervision.
- Proficiency in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.
Nice-to-haves
- Knowledge of the sport of soccer.
- Ability to work non-traditional hours, including evenings, weekends, and holidays.
Benefits
- Competitive starting base salary of $150,000 - $200,000.
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
- $500 wellness reimbursement.
- Generous Holiday and PTO schedule to promote work-life balance.
- On-the-job training, feedback, and ongoing educational opportunities.
- Flexibility of working remotely on Fridays, along with the option to take up to two additional remote flex days each month.
