Director, Personalization & Sentiment Technologies

About Four Seasons:

Four Seasons is powered by our people. We are a collective of individuals who crave to become better, to push ourselves to new heights and to treat each other as we wish to be treated in return. Our team members around the world create amazing experiences for our guests, residents, and partners through a commitment to luxury with genuine heart. We know that the best way to enable our people to deliver these exceptional guest experiences is through a world-class employee experience and company culture.         
At Four Seasons, we believe in recognizing a familiar face, welcoming a new one and treating everyone we meet the way we would want to be treated ourselves. Whether you work with us, stay with us, live with us or discover with us, we believe our purpose is to create impressions that will stay with you for a lifetime. It comes from our belief that life is richer when we truly connect to the people and the world around us.

About the location:

Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts is a global, luxury hotel management company. We manage over 120 hotels and resorts and 50 private residences in 47 countries around the world and growing. Central to Four Seasons employee experience and social impact programming is the company’s commitment to supporting cancer research, and the advancement of diversity, inclusion, equality and belonging at Four Seasons corporate offices and properties worldwide. At Four Seasons, we are powered by people and our culture enables everything we do.

The Director of Personalization & Sentiment is a key technical leadership role within the TID department, dedicated to enhancing customer engagement through data-driven personalization strategies and overseeing the platforms that power these efforts. Responsible for managing platforms such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Marketo, and Qualtrics, this role ensures seamless operations, fosters technical innovation, and aligns initiatives with organizational goals. By enabling and leveraging AI tools, the Director designs and implements holistic, personalized service communication strategies that enhance customer experience and drive meaningful results.

As a strategic IT partner to Hotel & Residential Operations, Marketing, Commercial, and Customer Experience teams, the Director leverages technical expertise to deliver value through automated workflows, advanced analytics, and tailored communication strategies. Combining visionary leadership with hands-on operational oversight, this role optimizes tools and processes to achieve measurable outcomes.

Collaborating across the organization, the Director drives the development of innovative personalization and service communication strategies that revolutionize customer engagement. They lead a data-driven approach to personalization by partnering with product management, data scientists, and analytics teams, while establishing KPIs and metrics to evaluate and continuously enhance the effectiveness of these strategies.

This role is based in Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Toronto Corporate Office, reporting to the Vice President, Guest & Residential Technologies. This role involves interactions with primarily internal stakeholders at various levels.

What You’ll Be Doing

Strategy and Planning:

• Collaborate on the development of and execute on the strategy for personalization initiatives, aligning with enterprise goals and priorities.

• Act as lead for the IT liaisons with Marketing and Customer Experience teams, providing technical guidance and ensuring effective collaboration.

• Oversee the consistent integrations of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Marketo, and Qualtrics into a cohesive personalization ecosystem.

• Establish a roadmap for platform enhancements, focusing on scalability, reliability, and automation.

Operational and Systems Management:

• Lead the team to manage the day-to-day operations of personalization solutions, ensuring system availability, performance, and security.

• Oversee efforts of automated workflows such as email campaigns, lifecycle marketing, sentiment analysis, and customer journey mapping.

• Collaborate with business units to identify new use cases and requirements, ensuring IT can support evolving personalization needs.

Project & Delivery Management:

• Leads team for discovery efforts and requirements gathering and prioritization on a project-by-project basis.

• Lead IT and business unit effort to determine project budgets, phases, workstreams, impacts, risks, outcome criteria, metrics and resources required.

• Lead options evaluation and analysis with Business Unit stakeholders to select reliable, scalable, well-architected, and supportable business solutions.

• Analyzes and verifies requirements for completeness, consistency, comprehensibility, feasibility, and conformity to standards.  

• Lead delivery management via internal teams and/or our consulting and vendor partners.

• Lead IT team through project, budget and resource tracking.

• Ensures completion of documentation as part of delivery.

Vendor Management:

• Proactively establishes strong vendor partner relationships for best understanding and implementation of vendor offerings in achievement of Business Unit objectives.

• Leads appropriate cadence of monthly and/or quarterly vendor communications.

• Holds vendor accountable for achieving committed objectives and outcomes in Four Seasons’ best interest.

• Manages vendor contracts, billing accuracy, and resource accountability.

Team Management:

• Build, mentor, and manage a team of platform administrators, developers, and analysts.

• Foster a collaborative environment focused on technical innovation and operational excellence.

• Conduct regular performance reviews, goal setting, and career development planning for team members.

Relationship Management:

• Lead strong relationships with BU, all cross-functional stakeholders and within IT.

• Instill trust and confidence among colleagues and internal customers.

• Lead and maintain positive on-going relationships with our consultants and vendor partners.

• Addresses areas of challenge or disagreement in professional and proactive fashion.

Who You Are

• Experienced architecture, roadmap, systems integration principles.

• Advanced knowledge of CRM tools.

• Advanced knowledge of marketing automation platforms.

• Complex Operational and project delivery experience, leading self and others, working with both internal and 3rd party teams

• Project management skills; Agile and Scrum methodologies, and Project management tools and techniques

• Environment and change management leadership

• Experience with ServiceNow + queue management

• Microsoft Office Suite, with strong Excel, Jira, TestRail

• Proficiency in data analytics and visualization tools.

• Technical Acumen in CRM and Personalization Platforms

• Proven experience with business requirements analysis, verification, and methodology development.

• Experience overseeing complex environment operations and stability.

• Experience overseeing the design, delivery and implementation of business solutions, systems and products.

• Demonstrated project management skills including planning, organizing and managing resources.

• IT financial skills including ROI, Total Cost of Ownership, annual + project budget, capital + operating principals.

• Stakeholder and Vendor management.

• Understanding of application development and software development life cycle concepts.

• Strong organizational skills, with keen attention to detail and ability to lead and organize work, across multiple teams, aspects and inputs

• Strong oral and written communication skills, strong presentation skills, with ability to create vision and buy-in

• Strong relationship- and team-building skills

• Strong abilities to generate options and problem solve in difficult situations

• Highly self-motivated and directed.

What You Bring

• 10+ years of IT experience, with at least 5 years in Personalization-focused roles.

• Proven expertise in managing and optimizing platforms related to

  • CRM, CDP (Salesforce, and others)

  • Customer Experience (Qualtrics, Medallia, or others)

  • Customer Engagement (Marketing Cloud, Marketo, others)

• Strong understanding of data integration, ETL processes, and APIs to connect various systems.

• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional teams and deliver complex projects.

• Prior experience in sentiment analysis and customer experience tools is highly desirable.

• Bachelor’s degree in information systems, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field; MBA or advanced technical certification is a plus.

This role will be a Hybrid working model, which will require 3 days per week in the Four Seasons Corporate Office located at 1165 Leslie Street, Toronto, Ontario #LI-Hybrid 

Four Seasons is committed to providing employment accommodation in accordance with the Ontario Human Rights Code and the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. If contacted for an employment opportunity, please advise Human Resources if you require accommodation.