Senior Creative Traffic Manager

Overview

Microsoft’s WDS Creative, Advertising & Integrated Marketing team is looking for a Senior Creative Traffic Manager to serve as the operational backbone of a high-volume, fast-paced creative organization.

This role serves as the central point of coordination across producers, creatives, agency partners, and stakeholders, ensuring work is prioritized, staffed, scheduled, and delivered efficiently. The ideal candidate excels at balancing competing demands, forecasting resource needs, identifying bottlenecks before they impact delivery, and creating visibility across a complex portfolio of integrated marketing and creative projects.

This role is responsible for driving clarity, visibility, and execution across the creative portfolio by establishing and evolving the operating infrastructure that enables teams to plan, prioritize, resource, track, and deliver work efficiently at scale. The Senior Creative Traffic Manager creates the systems, processes, tools, and governance that help creative teams work more effectively while providing leadership with clear insight into priorities, capacity, risks, and delivery health.

Success in this role means teams have clear visibility into what is happening, who is assigned, where priorities stand, and where risks require attention. Work moves efficiently through the organization, resources are allocated effectively, and opportunities to improve workflows and increase throughput are consistently identified and implemented. This role spans resource management, workflow design, portfolio operations, and cross-functional orchestration. Its primary focus is ensuring the right work is assigned to the right people at the right time while continuously improving how the organization operates.

Responsibilities

Portfolio & Workflow Management

• Build and maintain a unified portfolio view of active and upcoming creative initiatives.

• Create visibility into project status, priorities, resource allocation, key milestones, dependencies, and delivery risks.

• Maintain the master schedule and operational cadence for the creative organization.

• Ensure creative work progresses consistently through established workflow stages and governance checkpoints.

• Develop dashboards, reporting, and planning mechanisms that provide leadership with real-time visibility into organizational health.

Operational Excellence

• Create and maintain the master portfolio schedule and planning cadence for the creative organization.

• Drive consistent workflow processes, project governance, and status reporting.

• Surface delivery risks, bottlenecks, and resource constraints to leadership with clear mitigation recommendations.

• Develop dashboards and reporting that provide visibility into team capacity, utilization, throughput, and delivery health.

Resource Planning & Allocation

• Monitor utilization and proactively identify opportunities to improve efficiency and throughput.

• Manage creative resource allocation across designers, art directors, writers, producers, agencies, and external partners.

• Partner with team leads to understand skill sets, specialties, and capacity across the organization.

• Balance workloads and proactively address resourcing gaps, conflicts, and over-allocation risks.

• Forecast future staffing needs based on upcoming business priorities and campaign demand.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Partner closely with Creative Producers and Campaign Producers to ensure schedules are realistic and coordinated.

• Collaborate with creative leadership to align staffing decisions with business priorities and skill requirements.

• Coordinate with agency and vendor partners to ensure external resources are effectively integrated into planning.

• Facilitate planning sessions, prioritization discussions, and portfolio reviews.

Qualifications

Required/minimum qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Business, Marketing, Communications, Economics, Public Relations, or related field AND 3+ years integrated marketing (e.g., digital, relationship, social media, campaign), event management, marketing strategy, business planning, marketing operations, or related work experience OR equivalent experience.

Additional or preferred qualifications

• Master's Degree in Business, Marketing, Communications, Economics, Public Relations, or related field AND 2+ years integrated marketing (e.g., digital, relationship, social media, campaign), event management, marketing strategy, business planning, marketing operations, or related experience OR Bachelor's Degree in Business, Marketing, Communications, Economics, Public Relations, or related field AND 5+ years integrated marketing (e.g., digital, relationship, social media, campaign), event management, marketing strategy, business planning, marketing operations, or related experience OR equivalent experience.

• Experience managing multiple concurrent projects, stakeholders, and deadlines in a fast-paced environment.

• Experience with resource planning, capacity management, workload balancing, and scheduling.

• Experience supporting in-house creative teams, marketing organizations, agencies, or design studios.

• Knowledge of integrated marketing campaign development and creative production workflows.

• Experience with resource management and project management platforms

• Experience developing operational reporting and portfolio dashboards.

• Ability to influence stakeholders across multiple teams without direct authority.

Integrated Marketing IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $106,400 - $203,600 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $137,600 - $222,600 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:

https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations. (https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/accessibility.html)