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Operations & Project Management

Global Alliance Operations Director

VML/WPP Enterprise Solutions Chicago🇺🇸United StatesPosted Oct 21, 2026

Why this role stands out

This role offers a fantastic opportunity to drive impactful sales initiatives within a leading global enterprise solutions provider, working with top-tier technology partners. You'll thrive here if you possess strong organizational and relationship-building skills, enabling you to excel in coordinating complex projects and fostering seamless collaboration. If you're ready to contribute to significant client success and grow your career in a dynamic, partnership-focused environment, this position is for you.

Quick overview

Salary$60k - $140k/yr
SeniorityMid Senior
Work modeHybrid
LocationChicago, United States
Posted3 days ago

Job description

Who We Are

WPP Enterprise Solutions designs, builds, and operates the growth systems that competitive businesses rely on. In a world where Al is reshaping how companies drive growth, we lead clients in business transformation and marketing modernization, connecting strategy directly to execution. Our 12,000 experts in engineering and platforms, commerce, consulting, content transformation, CRM, and CX work within a unified global operating unit across 40+ markets. WPP Enterprise Solutions works alongside best-in-class partners including Adobe, AWS, Braze, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Shopify, as well as innovators in AI, to deliver growth solutions tailored to the needs of our clients’ businesses. VML, part of WPP, supports WPP Enterprise Solutions by helping brands activate transformation through creativity and experience.

Global Alliance Operations Director

WPP Enterprise Solutions · Reports to the Chief Alliance Officer · Global

The opportunity

WPP Enterprise Solutions runs its alliance program as a portfolio of partner alliances, each with its own leadership and its own commercial mechanics guided by the strategy set by the Chief Alliance Officer with support from a direct global team, a layer of regional cross-alliance leadership, and a set of Specialty Company resources who carry alliance or marketing responsibility for specific partners or regions — some reporting directly, some on a dotted line. WPP Enterprise Solutions needs a leader who can bring the direct team, the regional layer and the specialty companies together into one coherent program, so that whichever partner, region or specialty company a client conversation touches, WPP shows up as one company.

Enterprise Solutions is one of WPP’s four operating units — approximately $1.8B in revenue, serving more than 80 of the top 100 WPP clients across 40+ markets. The Alliances function itself is young and still being built out, and it already operates across every WPP region and through resources it does not directly employ. This role exists to make sure that as the program grows, it grows as a system — with one cadence and one standard — rather than as a collection of partner teams, regional teams and specialty companies that each run their own version of it.

Role summary

You will run the Alliances program day to day on behalf of the Chief Alliance Officer: the leadership and governance cadence across all partner alliances and the Industry & Partner Solutions Commercialization Lead, the materials that represent the function upward, the internal QBR process for every alliance, and the systems of record — starting with Salesforce — that make partner pipeline visible and trustworthy across a structure built from direct reports, dotted-line resources, regional cross-alliance leadership and Specialty Company partners. You will also build and lead a small team of your own — a mix of direct and dotted-line resources, sized to the work rather than fixed in advance, starting small and growing as the program proves itself out. Even with that team in place, most of what this role coordinates sits outside its own reporting line, so authority comes as much from the standard you set as from the team you directly manage. The title says Operations. In practice this is closer to a chief of staff role for the Alliances function — less “keep the trains running” and more “make sure a client or partner experiences one WPP, no matter which partner, region, or specialty company is actually doing the work.”

What this role owns, and what it coordinates

• Owns: the Alliances operating cadence across all nine partner alliances and the Industry & Partner Solutions Commercialization function — leadership meetings, steering committees, internal QBRprocess and materials — pipeline data quality and reporting in Salesforce, the training and certification calendar, a small and growing team of direct and dotted-line resources, and the standard operating model that every alliance lead, regional cross-alliance lead and specialty company resource works against.
• Contributes to, does not own: the commercial content of each partner’s joint business plan, which sits with that partner’s Global Alliance Lead or co-leads, and the cross-partner technical roadmap, which sits with the Industry & Partner Solutions Commercialization Lead. You build and run the system this work operates inside; you do not own the partner relationships or the solution architecture yourself.
• Coordinates with, does not control: the Regional Cross-Alliance Leads (EMEA, LATAM, APAC, ANZ, Brazil/LATAM) and the Specialty Company resources (MAP, PMWeb, Verticurl, The Cocktail, MarketData/Match), most of whom report on a dotted line directly into the Chief Alliance Officer or into the alliance they support rather than into this role; and the Partner Marketing Leads who sit under the CMO and are dotted into each alliance. You set the shared standard these resources operate against; you do not own their reporting line.

Core responsibilities

Program governance and executive support for the CAO (25%)

• Own the Alliances leadership cadence across all nine partner alliances, the Industry & Partner Solutions Commercialization Lead, and the Regional Cross-Alliance Leads — recurring 1:1s, leadership team meetings, steering committees and executive reviews — making sure the right people, materials and follow-ups show up every time, whichever partner or region is on the agenda.
• Hire, direct and grow your own small team as the program’s needs justify it — starting with a handful of direct or dotted-line resources and expanding based on demonstrated impact, not a fixed headcount plan.
• Build and own the materials that represent the Alliances function upward — Enterprise Solutions business reviews, leadership updates, and ad hoc requests from WPP leadership — so the Chief Alliance Officer walks into every senior conversation with a consistent, current narrative that covers the full portfolio, not just the partners with the most mature reporting.
• Run the internal QBR process for every alliance end to end — templates, prep, scheduling with partner-side counterparts, and follow-through on actions — so internal QBRs are a consistent institutional habit rather than something each alliance lead recreates from scratch, and rather than something that only happens for the partners with the most established teams.
• Act as a proxy for the Chief Alliance Officer in operational forums and follow-ups where direct executive presence isn’t required, and know which decisions need escalation versus which can be resolved directly.

Pipeline systems and reporting (25%)

• Own the health of Alliances data in Salesforce across all nine partner alliances — partner-sourced, partner-funded and partner-influenced opportunities recorded consistently and reconciled against what each alliance lead, regional cross-alliance lead and specialty company resource believes is in motion, even where that resource sits outside WPP’s core systems and reporting lines.
• Partner directly with WPP’s central Enterprise Solutions growth and RevOps resources to align Alliances reporting to the broader ES pipeline model, rather than maintaining a shadow system the rest of the business can’t read.
• Build the recurring reporting — pipeline, funding capture, co-sell conversion, delivery capability — that rolls up across all nine alliances and the Industry & Partner Solutions Commercialization practice into one picture for the Chief Alliance Officer and ES leadership, and flag where a specific alliance, region or specialty company’s data quality is putting that picture at risk.
• Own the tools and templates — joint business plan format, funding tracker, opportunity registration checklist — that let a new alliance, a new region, or a newly engaged specialty company stand up its practice against a known standard instead of starting from a blank page.

One-company alignment: cross-alliance, specialty company and partner marketing coordination (25%)

• Work with the Industry & Partner Solutions Commercialization Lead, the nine partner alliance leads, and Enterprise Solutions delivery leadership to define and operate the new-business handoff points, so a signed or funded opportunity in any partner or region moves cleanly into a resourced delivery engagement with clear ownership at every step.
• Bring Specialty Company resources — MAP, PMWeb, Verticurl, The Cocktail, MarketData/Match — into the same operating rhythm, reporting standard and client-facing narrative as WPP’s own alliance teams, so a client or partner experiences one coordinated program regardless of which entity is actually doing the work.
• Coordinate with the Partner Marketing Leads who sit under the CMO and support each alliance on a dotted line, so partner-facing marketing, campaigns and executive moments — Google Cloud Next, Microsoft Ignite, AWS re:Invent, and partner-specific equivalents — are planned against a shared calendar and a consistent WPP narrative rather than nine separate ones.
• Coordinate the training and certification calendar across all nine alliances — what’s required, by when, and funded by which partner skilling programme — so certification tracking is a managed pipeline rather than something each alliance lead or specialty resource chases individually.
• Surface and resolve operational friction anywhere in this structure — between an alliance lead and a specialty company resource, between a regional cross-alliance lead and a partner-specific regional team, between delivery and the alliance function — before it needs an escalation to the Chief Alliance Officer.

Global and regional consistency: EMEA, LATAM, APAC and ANZ (25%)

• Act as the connective layer between the Regional Cross-Alliance Leads — EMEA, LATAM, APAC, ANZ and Brazil/LATAM, most of whom report on a dotted line directly into the Chief Alliance Officer — and the partner-specific regional resources nested inside each alliance, such as regional sales, alliance and solutions leads, so the operating model reads as one system rather than two parallel structures that happen to cover the same territory.
• Identify where a global process needs a regional or specialty-company variant — funding mechanics, partner field structure, account coverage, local market dynamics — versus where the global standard should simply hold, and bring those distinctions back into the operating model rather than leaving each region or specialty resource to improvise.
• Build and maintain the regional relationships needed to keep every region’s pipeline, certification and internal QBR data — including data held by specialty company resources such as Verticurl in APAC or PMWeb in Brazil/LATAM — flowing into the same systems as the rest of the program, on the same cadence.
• Represent regional and specialty-company context back into Alliances leadership planning, so global decisions account for where they will, and won’t, translate across every market and every resourcing model WPP relies on.

How success is measured

• Data trust. Pipeline, funding and delivery numbers in Salesforce that Finance, ES leadership and every alliance lead — including specialty company and regional resources — all treat as the number, with a defined and adhered-to reconciliation cadence.
• Cadence adherence. internal QBRs, steering committees and leadership reviews happening on schedule, with materials ready in advance and actions tracked to closure, across all nine alliances and every region.
• Program cohesion. Specialty Company and dotted-line resources operating on the same cadence, systems and client-facing narrative as WPP’s own alliance teams, with inconsistencies surfaced and resolved rather than left to accumulate.
• Handoff quality. New-business handoffs into delivery happening against a documented process, with time-to-handoff and handoff-related escalations tracked and improving.
• Certification coverage. Training and certification requirements tracked against a plan across all nine alliances, with gaps visible before they become funding or eligibility problems.
• Team build-out. A small team stood up and demonstrating impact, with its growth tied to evidence — cadence held, data trusted, handoffs working — rather than to a headcount plan set on day one.
• Executive time. A measurable reduction in the operational and preparation load on the Chief Alliance Officer, evidenced by what the CAO is no longer personally assembling, chasing or reconciling.

Qualifications

Required

• Seven or more years combining program or business operations, chief-of-staff work, and cross-functional coordination — ideally supporting a senior executive or a matrixed function inside a professional services, technology, agency or consulting organisation.
• Demonstrated ability to drive consistency and accountability across a matrixed structure of direct reports, dotted-line resources and third-party or specialty-company partners — without formal authority over most of it.
• Hands-on fluency with Salesforce, or an equivalent CRM, as a pipeline and reporting tool — able to define data standards, audit data quality, and build reporting others can rely on, not just consume dashboards someone else built.
• Demonstrated experience running executive-facing cadences and materials — internal QBRs, steering committees, leadership reviews — end to end, including prep, facilitation support and follow-through.
• Comfort working across a global, matrixed organisation, including direct experience coordinating with or supporting teams in more than one region.
• Strong written and visual communication skills; able to turn ambiguous, in-progress work into materials a senior executive can present without heavy rework.

Preferred

• Experience inside a technology alliance, partnership or channel function — enough fluency with co-sell, funding and partner-delivered revenue mechanics to structure systems around them credibly, even without owning the relationships directly.
• Experience building or scaling a small team from the ground up — hiring or acquiring resources as the case for headcount was proven, rather than inheriting an already-staffed organisation.
• Experience working with or managing outsourced, specialty-agency or joint-venture resources — comparable to WPP’s Specialty Company model — as part of a coordinated client or partner offering.
• Prior chief-of-staff, business-operations or program-management experience supporting a functional leader, not just a single team, through a period of active scaling.
• Experience with partner ecosystem tools — Salesforce Partner Relationship Management, Google Cloud Partner Advantage, Microsoft Partner Center, AWS Partner Central — as a systems administrator or power user.
• Willingness to travel to support regional teams and key partner moments.

How this role is positioned

This role sits alongside nine partner-facing alliance leadership seats — Adobe, AWS, Shopify, Salesforce, Emerging Partners, Kyndryl, Braze, Microsoft and Google — and the Industry & Partner Solutions Commercialization Lead, but does not own a partner relationship itself. It leads a small, growing team of its own, but most of the direct reports, dotted-line resources, regional cross-alliance leadership and Specialty Company partners that make up the broader program sit outside that team and outside this role’s formal authority. Its job is to make all of it function, and present, as one company. Where the partner-facing roles are measured on the pipeline and revenue a specific partner brings to WPP, this role is measured on whether the system underneath all of them — cadence, data, certification, and one consistent story to partners and clients — holds together across every partner, every region and every resourcing model. It reports directly to the Chief Alliance Officer and is, in practice, the role that lets that function scale.

The base salary range for this position at the time of this posting is indicated below. Individual compensation varies based on job-related factors, including location, business needs, level of responsibility, experience, and qualifications. We offer a competitive benefits package, click WPP Benefits for more details.

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$75,000—$180,000 USD

About WPP

WPP is the trusted growth partner for the world’s leading brands. With exceptional talent, trusted data and intelligence and world-class partnerships – all united by our agentic marketing platform, WPP Open – we help clients navigate change, capture opportunity and deliver transformational growth. For more information, visit WPP.com.

WPP (VML/WPP Enterprise Solutions) is an equal opportunity employer and considers applicants for all positions without discrimination or regard to characteristics. We are committed to fostering a culture of respect in which everyone feels they belong and has the same opportunities to progress in their careers.

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