Director, Inventory Business Operations and Strategy
The Trade DeskAbout the role
The Trade Desk is a global technology company and the world’s leading independent platform for digital advertising, with nearly 4,000 employees across more than 30 offices. Our technology helps advertisers reach the right audiences across the open internet — from streaming TV and podcasts to mobile apps, news, and more.
Advertising powers the content people love. By making it more transparent, effective, and responsible, we help support trusted journalism, quality entertainment, and creators worldwide. The world’s brands and agencies rely on us to reach their customers and grow their businesses responsibly.
The scale of our platform brings unique technical challenges — from processing massive datasets in real time to building systems that operate reliably on a global scale. When you work here, your impact is worldwide. We welcome diverse perspectives, encourage curiosity, and build teams that learn from one another. If you’re driven to solve meaningful challenges, we’d love to meet you.
About the Role
The Director, Inventory Business Operations and Strategy role exists to build and scale the Inventory org, the approaches, and the work the org does. It is not a catch-all for things the SVP of Inventory Partnerships does not have time for. This person becomes a nexus: a high-trust, cross-functional operator who helps other teams do their work more successfully without doing it for them.
In practice, that means being a translation layer. When Product is trying to understand what Inventory is actually after, they come here first. When a cross-functional initiative is losing coherence, this person provides the context and clarity that gets it back on track. The leverage this role creates is organization, and it compounds over time.
This role carries a dotted line to the Sr Director of Business Operations and operates with high agency across a genuinely interdisciplinary scope: Inventory, Product, Sales, and GTM.
What You’ll Do
Core Mandate
- Iterate on and launch new approaches to how the team operates, how it engages cross-functionally, and how it brings new products and frameworks to life
- Become the connective tissue across Inventory, Product, Sales, and GTM, providing clarity and context so other teams can move forward without unnecessary escalation
- Reduce SVP dependencies by ensuring clear ownership, shared context, and consistent principles across functions (not by gatekeeping but by enabling)
- Serve as a liaison between Inventory and Sales/GTM, ensuring both sides have the context they need to move quickly and Inventory’s priorities shape how commercial teams position
- Partner with Business Operations on planning cycles, goal setting, and the rhythm of the business to keep Inventory’s priorities sharp and well represented
- Drive self-directed analysis into the strategic questions that matter most, proactively investigating why key business metrics are where they are, what would need to change to move them, and what headwinds or tailwinds the org should be anticipating
- Serve as a knowledge aggregator for the org, synthesizing what the team knows across functions into a living base of context that others can draw on, reducing information loss and repeated ramp up
Priority Projects
- Build Leverage for VP Direct Reports: Systematize what is consuming their time, create repeatable operating structure, and surface what is stuck before it becomes an escalation
- Streamline Exec Brief and Status Report Requests: Build a repeatable system so that when leadership needs a brief on a partner or a status update ahead of a meeting, the team can respond quickly without pulling people away from partner-facing work
- Fix Gaps in How Supply Path Questions are Handled: Ensure BD & CS have what they need to respond to RFIs, RFPs, etc. with confidence
- Operationalize a Client Engagement Framework: Build the intake, routing, and tracking infrastructure that connects Inventory participation to BD & CS opportunities
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