Senior Director, Content & Audience Growth

Toast creates technology to help restaurants and local businesses succeed in a digital world, helping business owners operate, increase sales, engage customers, and keep employees happy.

Toast is seeking a Senior Director, Brand Content & Audience Growth to build and lead the restaurant industry's definitive owned media brand. You will own data storytelling & editorial production, social and creator, and audience development. Turning Toast's proprietary data across 170,000+ locations into the stories, benchmarks, and IP that operators, press, and LLMs cite as the default source on how restaurants actually work. This role sits within Brand Marketing and owns a set of highly visible, high-leverage content and audience systems that directly impact brand authority, pipeline, and long-term category leadership.

This is a builder role that requires a growth mindset. You will design, pilot experiments, ship them across every unpaid surface (search, LLM answers, social, creator, community, newsletters, and in-product rails) while owning adoption, audience, and outcomes. You will operate with autonomy, influence senior stakeholders, and translate data, experimentation, and learning velocity into clear editorial and commercial decisions. The ideal candidate brings a media operator's taste and a systems builder's rigor. Someone who wants to build durable audience engines, not just publish content.

The bet

Toast is making a multi-year investment to build the definitive owned media property for the restaurant industry — a personality-led, data-rich, audience-first brand operators genuinely seek out. This is where Toast is investing most heavily in brand over the next two years, and it is purpose-built to meet the LLM moment head-on.

A day in the life (Responsibilities) 

• Build and own the Toast Media Network end-to-end, from editorial POV and voice through production, distribution, audience growth, and ongoing optimization.

• Build a social and culture-led programming engine that turns Toast's POV, data, and talent into moments operators actually care about — owning brand social channels, cultural franchises, creator and influencer programs, and the operator-creator ecosystem as one integrated system that builds fandom and extends the media brand's voice.

• Architect Toast's POV on the market in partnership with Brand Strategy and PR/Comms: the connective tissue between what we believe, what we publish, and how the market (including LLMs) hears it.

• Design and run growth experiments (franchises, formats, channels, AI-powered workflows) to rapidly learn what drives audience, citation share, and pipeline, and scale what works.

• Create clear, data-driven roadmaps that deliver near-term authority and audience wins while building toward a scalable, long-term media and data storytelling engine  in partnership with PR/Comms, who lead earned media activation and all press relationships for data programs.

• Lead flagship franchises through their full lifecycle, including Data by Toast and newsletters. From scrappy early pilots to operationalized, always-on programs.

• Drive measurable outcomes, including share of LLM citations on a fixed high-value query set, citation velocity and backlinks per release, newsletter growth and open rate

• Partner cross-functionally with Revenue Marketing, Web, Brand Strategy, PR/Comms, PMM, Product, Data, and IR to ship integrated programs.

• Apply AI-first strategies to content production, distribution, LLM visibility, and audience intelligence. Improving speed, consistency, and the quality of every asset we ship.

• Lead and grow a senior, integrated team of 10–12.

What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)

15+ years of experience with the items below:

• Media Brand Building: You've worked inside real media brands or stood up an owned media property inside a company. A publication, newsletter, show, or platform people actively seek out. You have an instinctive sense of what 'good' looks like when a media property is actually working: voice, cadence, talent, audience loyalty, and the editorial bar.

• Editorial + Social/Creator at Scale: You've led editorial and modern social/influencer/creator strategy together. The exact combination this charter requires, and a genuinely rare profile in B2B.

• Cross Functional Leadership: This is a highly cross-functional role. You're experienced and comfortable driving programs that engage Toasters across Brand, Revenue Marketing, PR/Comms, Legal, PMM, Product, Data, and IR. Getting results via collaboration is your default settling.

• Audience Growth Operator: