[Hiring] Direct Response Data Manager @Aquent

Role Description

The Direct Response Data Manager acts as the critical bridge between strategy, creative, and technical data operations during agency's busiest fundraising period. Operating across Network and Custom tracks, this role ensures all business rules, donor segmentation logic, and data instructions are rigorously maintained, translated, validated, and quality-controlled before and after reaching data processing. The Data Manager safeguards campaign schedules, resolves missing or conflicting business rules, and enforces data governance standards across production-bound mail files.

Core Responsibilities

• Data Instruction Validation & Authoring: Review client strategies across Network and Custom tracks to author, update, and validate comprehensive data instructions used by strategists and the data engineering team.
• Business Rule & Documentation Management: Maintain and manage the client's data guidebook (wiki) and line-by-line data dictionary. Capture new business rules, identify missing or conflicting logic, and translate strategy briefs into executable technical instructions.
• Campaign & Grid Support: Support strategists during grid creation, donor select generation, and campaign brief handoffs to ensure clean inputs from day one.
• Quality Control & File Auditing: Perform rigorous quality control on data files returned from data processing and audit mail entry outputs from the lettershop to ensure strict campaign fidelity.
• Data Quality & Escalation Point: Serve as the primary escalation point for data quality issues, ensuring technical questions are resolved with client teams before data processor execution.
• Data Governance & Compliance: Uphold data governance, security, and PII handling standards on every client engagement.
• Knowledge Transfer: Build and refine standardized data instruction templates and process documentation throughout the engagement for seamless handover to staff.

Qualifications

• Direct Response Experience: 3+ years in direct response data management, including donor segmentation, selects, suppressions, merge/purge rules, source coding, and writing error-free data instructions.
• Database & Technical Skills: 2+ years of hands-on experience with SQL and relational databases.
• Data Engineering Knowledge: Working knowledge of ETL builds, data warehousing, and data quality practices.
• Adaptability & Mindset: Comfort learning proprietary data platforms combined with a service-oriented mindset and the discipline required for a role accountable for production-bound mail files.
• Availability: Immediate availability for start on October 26, 2026, with strict adherence to U.S. business hours (ET/CT overlap).

Preferred Qualifications & Background

• Target Backgrounds: Technical Project Managers, Data Project Managers, or Business Analysts. (Data Engineers will be considered, but must possess strong client-facing communication skills - this is not a hands-on data engineering role).
• CRM Systems: Experience with enterprise CRM platforms, with hands-on Salesforce experience strongly preferred. Comfort learning donor/constituent management systems quickly.
• Cloud Infrastructure: Exposure to AWS data services, cloud data warehousing, or lakehouse tooling is a plus (role will not build ETL pipelines directly).