Senior Director, Community & Advocacy

About this role

<div class="content-intro"><p>At Braze, we have found our people. We’re a genuinely approachable, exceptionally kind, and intensely passionate crew.</p> <p>We seek to ignite that passion by setting high standards, championing teamwork, and creating work-life harmony as we collectively navigate rapid growth on a global scale while striving for greater equity and opportunity – inside and outside our organization.</p> <p>To flourish here, you must be prepared to set a high bar for yourself and those around you. There is always a way to contribute: Acting with autonomy, having accountability and being open to new perspectives are essential to our continued success.</p> <p>Our deep curiosity to learn and our eagerness to share diverse passions with others gives us balance and injects a one-of-a-kind vibrancy into our culture.</p> <p>If you are driven to solve exhilarating challenges and have a bias toward action in the face of change, you will be empowered to make a real impact here, with a sharp and passionate team at your back. If Braze sounds like a place where you can thrive, we can’t wait to meet you.</p></div><h3>About the Role</h3> <p>Braze powers the world's most ambitious consumer engagement programs — and the Braze Community is the practitioners, certified experts, and ambassadors who run them, building their careers and defining the standard for the discipline.</p> <p>You will own that ecosystem: our flagship community platform, our customer advocacy program, our executive Customer Advisory Boards, and our customer storytelling motion. You'll lead a focused, senior team of five and partner closely with Product Marketing, Content Marketing, Customer Experience, Demand Generation, and our events teams.</p> <p>These programs are healthy, growing, and genuinely loved — tens of thousands of practitioners in the product monthly, a digital community in the thousands, champions in the hundreds. What they are not yet is fully wired into how Braze retains and grows customers. That's the job: take programs people admire and make them programs the business runs on.</p> <h3>What You'll Do</h3> <p><strong>Lead the community function.</strong> Own the strategy and operating cadence of Braze Bonfire — online forums, regional meetups, and recognition programs. Engagement is the foundation, and you'll keep raising that bar — but it isn't the finish line. Wire the community into how Braze operates: community signals feeding account health and CS workflows, support deflection measured, and meetups planned jointly with our regional events strategy as a deliberate retention and expansion lever, not a parallel calendar.</p> <p><strong>Lead the advocacy function.</strong> Own Braze Customer Champions end-to-end: a tiered program producing a steady supply of references, speakers, storytellers, and product co-creators. Make pulling from the champion bench the default move for every customer-facing team. Measure influence with rigor: pipeline-touched, references-sourced, advocacy-led content produced.</p> <p><strong>Own our Customer Advisory Boards.</strong> Run a small number of high-stakes CABs aligned to Braze's flagship moments. Build the executive-to-executive experience that earns time from our most strategic customers, and partner with Product and PMM to turn customer insight into roadmap and narrative.</p> <p><strong>Own customer storytelling.</strong> Stand up the testimonial capture motion across video, written, and quotable formats, and keep customer voices flowing into case studies, campaigns, and analyst-facing programs with PMM and Content Marketing.</p> <p><strong>Connect community, advocacy, and learning.</strong> Braze is building a unified customer empowerment ecosystem — learner → community participant → advocate → champion. You'll co-design the journeys, shared identity, and measurement framework that make it feel like one experience.</p> <p><strong>Lead and develop a team.</strong> Your team of five — digital community, advocacy (principal + specialist), and community & learning events (manager + specialist) — is a high-ownership group where every person carries a program. Set direction, raise the bar, and develop them, while operating credibly with VPs and SVPs across Braze.</p> <p><strong>Run the function on numbers.</strong> Own a clear KPI tree: engagement, advocacy influence dollars, share of at-risk and expansion accounts touched by community and events motions, CAB follow-through, story volume and utilization. Build investment cases on that framework.</p> <h3> </h3> <h3>Who You Are</h3> <p><strong>You've led a customer advocacy program at scale.</strong> You've built or substantially grown a reference, champion, or ambassador program in B2B software — the operating infrastructure, the tiers, and the GTM relationships that make teams pull from it by default.</p> <p><strong>You've run a customer community of meaningful scale.</strong> You know the difference between community as a marketing channel and community as a customer experience, and you optimize for the second because the first follows. You've lived through a migration or re-platforming and have opinions about it.</p> <p><strong>You're comfortable in pipeline conversations.</strong> Influence dollars, references closed, expansion influenced — you can defend the function's investment with credible numbers, as a peer to sales and CS leaders.</p> <p><strong>You operate cross-functionally at a senior level.</strong> PMM on storytelling,…