Associate Director, Strategic Partnerships
Role: Associate Director, Strategic Partnerships
Department: Business Development
Job Location: Remote (Canada)
Role Type: Full-Time, Permanent
Hours: Monday - Friday 9AM-5PM (in your timezone, flexible hours)
Compensation: $112,000 - $163,000 CAD + Benefits
About Thrive
Thrive is a leading full-funnel digital marketing agency supporting growth for some of North America's most ambitious companies. We evolve our services through disciplined learning, continuous improvement, and close partnership with our clients - regularly assessing what works, what doesn't, and where to raise the bar.
Our mission is to help companies grow sustainably. We've built deep expertise across performance marketing, brand marketing, digital design, and data and measurement, managing more than $5 billion USD in advertising spend over the past decade. Our work spans startups, scale-ups, and enterprise organizations, including Alo, Zoom, Slack, Uber, Asana, Masterclass, Snapchat, Change.org, and lululemon.
Our culture values curiosity, accountability, and thoughtful problem-solving. We challenge our teams to grow and take ownership of their work while respecting boundaries and long-term sustainability.
The Role
Joining Thrive's Business Development department as Associate Director, Strategic Partnerships, you'll be one of Thrive's senior technical voices in sales moments. You'll be involved in business development calls, RFPs, and audits across a range of different kinds of opportunities. With a background in paid media, you'll articulate Thrive's values, differentiators, and the driving principles behind managing modern paid media campaigns.
You'll partner with our team to qualify opportunities, execute sales workflows, and present and defend recommendations in high-stakes rooms. You'll translate complex ad platform, measurement, and creative data into clear, credible insights tied to client business outcomes. Internally, you'll own Thrive's audit discipline, coach the stakeholders who contribute to it, and help the team develop content for use within the sales process and other company functions. Externally, you'll participate in client travel, events, and key moments for existing clients.
Responsibilities
- Domain: Set the standard for Thrive's technical audit discipline across paid media, measurement, and creative. Own the quality of strategic audits and RFP responses, ensuring recommendations are evidence-based, actionable, and tied to client outcomes.
- Client: Build client confidence as a senior technical advocate throughout the new business process and existing partnerships. Present and defend strategic recommendations to executive stakeholders, translating complex technical findings into clear business insights.
- People: Build audit capability across Thrive by coaching cross-functional contributors across Performance, Creative, Data, and Strategy. Establish quality standards, provide feedback, and develop resources that strengthen the team's technical expertise and delivery.
- Company: Support Thrive's growth by strengthening how the company qualifies and wins new business opportunities. Partner with Business Development leaders to shape sales strategy, identify client growth opportunities, and inform service positioning and market differentiation.
Onboarding Plan
- In your first 30 days, you'll learn Thrive's sales process and performance marketing approach, including observing our audit process, how we think about multichannel strategies that generate leads and revenue for our most complex clients, and begin leading technical components of calls, as well as begin leading sales-focused audits with some support.
- In your first 60 days, you'll lead technical components of client pitches and conversations, and lead sales-driven audits and RFPs.
- In your first 90 days, you'll own all technical components of client pitches and conversations, and lead sales-driven audits and RFPs from back-end analysis through to pitch.
Qualifications
- You've directly managed, audited, and optimized enterprise paid media programs with at least $250,000 USD in monthly spend, across e-commerce and/or demand generation.
- You're recognized as a performance marketing expert, with hands-on depth in Google Ads, Meta, and at least two other major platforms (e.g., Microsoft, TikTok, LinkedIn, Amazon, programmatic/DSPs).
- You have a strong understanding of measurement: incrementality and lift testing, MMM, attribution, server-side and conversion tracking, and GA4 or equivalent analytics.
- You've led audits end-to-end and spearheaded the technical components of the sales process, turning account-level data into insights and prioritized recommendations.
- You have excellent analytical skills: you're comfortable working through large datasets, building forecasts and budget scenarios, and pulling unique insights from both quantitative and qualitative data.
- You have excellent written and verbal communication skills, and have the ability to make complex technical findings clear and persuasive for any audience.
- You've presented and defended recommendations to C-suite and senior marketing stakeholders in high-stakes new-business and expansion conversations.
- You've coordinated sales, strategy, media, creative, and data contributors across audits and RFPs, owning scope, timelines, narrative, and quality.