Director, Customer Data Platforms

About 2U

At 2U, we are all in on purpose. We are motivated by our mission – to make learning limitless – and connected by our shared passion to deliver world-class higher education at scale. As the parent company of edX, a leading online learning platform, 2U powers thousands of higher education offerings – from free courses to full degrees. Together with our college, university, and corporate partners, we are helping accelerate careers and transform lives.

What We’re Looking For: Director, Customer Data Platforms

2U is seeking a transformational Director to lead the vision, development, and continuous evolution of our Customer Data Platform (CDP) — the central engine powering the teams responsible for driving revenue and growth.

Reporting into the Marketing Technology Product organization, this leader will play a pivotal role in shaping how 2U connects data, technology, marketing strategy, and customer insights to create a truly customer-centric product experience and cohesive multi-channel engagement strategy.

We are looking for an ambitious, outcomes-driven leader who can turn complex data ecosystems into competitive advantage — accelerating our ability to deliver personalized, consistent, and high-impact interactions across every digital and ecommerce touchpoint. This role is not only about managing systems, but about driving measurable business results, influencing strategy, and enabling the next generation of data-powered marketing at scale.

Responsibilities Include:

• Provide strategic leadership and senior level oversight to drive development of our CDP capabilities, based on the needs of our internal customers and the expectations of our learners around the use of data for experience personalization.
• Contribute to the creation of robust segmentation and testing strategies aimed at personalizing the customer experience (revenue teams such as marketplace and marketing will own the customer journey and segmentation criteria).
• Partner with engineering, data science, marketing, product, and other cross-functional teams to define data structures, general product requirements and user acceptance testing models for customer data models and CDP functionality.
• Ensure that business goals and objectives surrounding CDP are met and allow the organization to leverage powerful insights that drive strategic decision-making for our customer data strategies.
• Own the customer data platform and be an evangelist for its value proposition, including promoting new features, being the SME for CDP best practices, providing documentation for end users, and solving for the normalization of customer data across multiple, siloed lines of businesses.
• Understand privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA and work with our privacy, engineering, and security teams to ensure consent and permissions are updated and upheld when needed.

Required Background:

• Bachelor’s degree required, Master’s degree preferred.
• Minimum 8-10 years industry experience in a product management or marketing technology role.
• Minimum 8-10 years experience with customer data platforms (CDPs) and best practices. Twilio Engage (formerly Segment Personas) and/or Salesforce CDP preferred.
• Experience in the education and/or ecommerce industry preferred.
• Comfortable learning and discussing technical concepts.
• Strong planning, communication and organizational skills.
• Experience working on cross functional teams with multiple stakeholders.
• Project management experience a plus.

Benefits & Culture at 2U

Our global employee base is a diverse collection of innovators, dreamers, and doers working together to transform lives through higher education. We believe that every employee can advance our shared purpose, and that life at 2U should be fun and meaningful. If you’re excited by the opportunity to provide millions of learners and counting with access to world-class higher education, then join us – and do work that makes a difference.

We offer comprehensive benefits (unique per country) and excellent work/life balance.

Full-time, U.S. benefits include:

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Life insurance, disability, and 401(k) employer match.
• Free snacks and drinks in-office.
• Generous paid holidays and leave policies, including unlimited PTO.
• Additional time off benefits include: volunteer days, parental leave, and a company-wide winter break.

Key skills/competency

• Customer Data Platform (CDP)
• Marketing Technology
• Product Management
• Strategic Leadership
• Data Personalization
• Data Segmentation
• Cross-functional Collaboration
• Data Governance
• Privacy Regulations (GDPR/CCPA)
• Project Management