Director, Digital Operations - The Orchard

About The Orchard

The Orchard is a leading full-service music distribution company operating in 48 markets worldwide and servicing top global independent artists and labels. With cutting-edge operations and an unparalleled global team, The Orchard partners with clients to provide full scale solutions across a variety of verticals. Championed by an exceptional community of music lovers and experts, The Orchard empowers creators to grow and evolve in the dynamic, global industry.  

The Orchard focuses on providing a comfortable, social, and engaging environment to encourage productivity and creativity. 

This position reports to VP, Digital Operations based in NYC

The Director, Digital Operations is responsible for leading and optimizing The Orchard’s global digital supply chain, with a focus on accuracy, compliance, and operational excellence across UGC and fingerprinting services. This role oversees the systems, processes, and standards that ensure sound recordings and metadata are delivered correctly, efficiently, and in alignment with partner requirements and client expectations. Acting as a central operational authority, the Director develops SOPs, authors critical documentation, manages backlog prioritization, and resolves high-impact delivery or ingestion issues.

In addition to overseeing day-to-day supply chain performance, the Director serves as the operational lead for catalog migration initiatives of any scale—defining best practices, establishing cross-functional workflows, and ensuring successful execution across global teams. This role requires deep technical understanding of digital delivery specifications, rights identification, and partner ingestion behavior, combined with the leadership skills to guide internal teams, drive process improvements, and collaborate with product, engineering, and business stakeholders.

What you'll do: 

• Office- first role, in office 4 days a week.

UGC and Fingerprinting Supply Chain

• Establish and maintain standard operating procedures (SOPs) for monitoring The Orchard’s ERN SRR feeds to UGC and fingerprinting partners
• Ensure sound recordings are delivered accurately and consistently to UGC and fingerprinting services, maintaining high data integrity and partner compliance
• Oversee and resolve encoding, delivery, and ingestion errors across all ERN SRR feeds, coordinating with engineering, product, and partner operations teams as needed
• Monitor ERN SRR delivery and ingestion timelines to ensure partner SLAs are met and internal standards for responsiveness are achieved
• Manage and prioritize the supply chain backlog, ensuring timely processing of deliveries, updates, and takedowns based on business impact and partner requirements
• Author internal documentation for troubleshooting complex delivery pipelines, including guidance on confirming identifiers (ISRC, UPC, proprietary IDs) and determining rights ownership across territories
• Create documentation to support manual execution of supply chain actions (e.g., queuing deliveries, triggering updates, issuing takedowns), ensuring clarity for both regional and global teams
• Liaise with UGC and fingerprinting partners on delivery specs, ingestion behavior, support escalations, and metadata requirements
• Establish and manage a standardized process for onboarding new UGC partners to The Orchard’s ERN SRR feeds, including requirements gathering, delivery configuration, and validation workflows

Catalog Migration Leadership

• Develop migration frameworks that account for varying catalog types (e.g., M&A, new client catalog, expansion of rights for existing clients) and differing technical or metadata complexities
• Lead cross-functional alignment by collaborating with internal teams (Operations, Rights Management, Product & Engineering, Relationship Management, Solutions) to ensure roles and responsibilities, and all operational requirements and downstream impacts are understood and accounted for
• Serve as the escalation point for high‑priority issues that arise during migration execution, providing guidance, troubleshooting, and decision-making support
• Analyze migration outcomes and compile post‑mortems to identify root causes of issues, formalize lessons learned, and drive continuous improvement
• Build documentation and repeatable workflows that scale globally and can be used to train teams across regions
• Ensure migration processes uphold compliance with partner delivery specifications and internal data governance standards
• Create and enforce quality assurance standards for pre‑migration validation, in‑migration monitoring, and post‑migration reconciliation to ensure me