Director, Digital Marketing (Paid Search)

Job Description

Job ID: MJ000389

About The Role

Paid search is Traveloka's largest paid channel and its most measurable one. You'll own it: the operating plan, the budget, the team, and the outcome, measured as incremental growth for the business rather than channel metrics.

We're changing how this function works, and this role leads that change:

• From markets to capabilities. Account structure and bidding run as regional disciplines, not country by country.
• From attributed to incremental. One measure of success that finance and leadership trust.
• From manual to automated. Build in-house capability in bidding and optimisation, and automate the operational work so the team spends its time on decisions.
  
  

What You'll Do

• Own the paid search operating plan and a major share of the paid-media budget across our markets, accountable for incremental growth and profit.
• Lead through team leads and senior specialists: set priorities, targets and trade-offs, and hold the bar on how decisions get made.
• Re-architect the function from country-based to capability-based, and own that change end to end, including the people side.
• Set the standard for measurement and budget governance: incrementality testing, clear allocation rules, numbers that hold up under scrutiny.
• Build in-house bidding, optimisation and automation capability, and lead the team's hands-on use of AI to remove manual work.
• Run our most strategic platform relationships: negotiate early access, test scope and commercial terms through conflicting objectives.
• Build the bench: hire, develop, and where needed exit, and leave a leadership pipeline behind you.
• Position paid search for structural change: AI-driven search, privacy, and shifts in how travellers discover and book.
  
  

What You Bring

Must have

• 10+ years in performance marketing, growth or an analytically intensive role, including leading a team through managers.
• Owned a large paid-media budget against business outcomes, and can explain what you changed when the numbers told you to.
• Close enough to the data to challenge your own team's numbers. You can interrogate transaction-level data yourself.
• Led a structural change to a team or function as its owner, and saw it through.
• Designed or commissioned incrementality measurement (holdouts, geo tests, MMM) and made budget calls on the result.
• A quantitative degree (engineering, maths, statistics, economics, CS) or equivalent demonstrated depth.
• Strong communication skills with company leadership, and you can defend a recommendation under questioning.
  
  

Strong plus

• Paid search leadership at scale.
• Travel, e-commerce or marketplace background.
• Multi-market APAC experience across Southeast Asia, North Asia and Australia.
• Built in-house bidding or automation capability, or brought work back from an agency.
• A consulting or analytics background before marketing.