Overview
You run the marketing operations function at Checkr, managing a team that handles marketing automation, performance analytics, and tech stack management. You partner with marketing leadership to build strategies that generate pipeline from SMB all the way up to Enterprise accounts. You're the person who makes sure the marketing engine runs efficiently and that data flows correctly between systems.
Role Snapshot
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Role Type | Marketing Operations Manager |
| Sales Motion | Supporting both inbound (marketing-generated) and outbound motions |
| Deal Complexity | N/A - you're enablement/infrastructure |
| Sales Cycle | N/A - you support the sales org |
| Deal Size | N/A - you're measured on pipeline contribution |
| Quota (est.) | No quota - measured on team output, campaign performance, lead quality |
Company Context
Stage: Late-stage private (Series D+, 1,600+ employees)
Size: 1,672 employees
Growth: Expanding rev ops team aggressively, investing in AI/automation
Market Position: Established player in background screening with tech-forward positioning against traditional competitors
What You'll Actually Do
Time Breakdown
Team Management (30%) | Strategic Planning (25%) | Tech Stack/Systems (25%) | Meetings/Internal (20%)
Key Activities
- Team Leadership: You manage analysts and specialists across performance marketing, marketing analytics, and systems. This means 1:1s, unblocking them on projects, reviewing their work, and hiring when headcount opens up.
- Tech Stack Management: You own the marketing technology budget and roadmap. You're evaluating new tools, managing vendor relationships, ensuring integrations work, and dealing with the inevitable Salesforce-Marketo sync issues.
- Campaign Infrastructure: You build the operational framework for campaigns - setting up automation workflows, defining lead scoring models, creating attribution reporting, and making sure conversions are tracked correctly.
- Strategic Planning: You sit in leadership meetings with CMO and VP Marketing to translate business goals into operational execution. You're proposing where to invest budget, what segments to focus on, and how to measure success.
- AI/Automation Projects: You're expected to implement "AI-first" strategies, which likely means testing conversational AI tools, building smarter lead routing, and automating repetitive tasks that your team currently does manually.
The Honest Reality
What's Hard
- "Zero tolerance for manual processes" is aspirational: You inherit legacy processes and tech debt. Cleaning that up while keeping campaigns running is slow and political. Marketing wants new capabilities, but you're often stuck maintaining what exists.
- AI hype vs. reality: The job description mentions "AI strategy" heavily, but most marketing AI tools are still immature. You'll spend time testing things that don't work and managing expectations about what's actually possible.
- Cross-functional dependency hell: You don't control sales ops or IT, but you need them to make changes for you. Getting Salesforce fields updated or new integrations approved takes weeks of back-and-forth.
- Attribution is always wrong: Marketing wants credit for pipeline. Sales says the leads are garbage. You're stuck in the middle trying to build reports that make both sides happy, knowing the data is never fully accurate.
- Competing priorities across segments: SMB wants speed and volume. Enterprise wants quality and personalization. You're building systems that have to serve both, which means compromises everywhere.
What Success Looks Like
- Your team delivers clean data and your dashboards are trusted by leadership
- Marketing campaigns run without manual intervention and leads route correctly
- You reduce marketing tech spend while maintaining or improving performance
- Your team members get promoted or recruited away (sign of strong development)
- You successfully implement 2-3 meaningful automation projects per quarter
Who You're Supporting
Primary Stakeholders:
- CMO and VP Marketing (your main partners - you're translating their strategy into operations)
- Demand Gen team (they rely on your infrastructure to run campaigns)
- Sales leadership (they complain about lead quality and want better routing)
- Revenue Operations (you coordinate with them on data, reporting, and system integrations)
What They Care About:
- Marketing Leadership: Pipeline contribution, cost per lead, campaign ROI, and whether they have the data they need for board presentations
- Sales: Lead quality, response times, and whether the CRM data is accurate enough to actually work leads
- Finance: Proving marketing spend is efficient and tying it to closed revenue
Requirements
- 8+ years in marketing operations, with at least 2-3 years managing people
- Deep knowledge of marketing automation platforms (likely Marketo based on the other role) and Salesforce
- Experience building marketing ops from scratch or scaling it during hypergrowth
- Strong opinions about process automation and willingness to push back on manual workarounds
- Ability to translate between technical implementation and business strategy
- Experience working across SMB and Enterprise GTM motions (different lead volumes, conversion rates, and sales processes)
- Comfort with ambiguity - "AI strategy" is vague and you'll need to define what that actually means