Director, AI & Data Product

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Director, AI & Data Product

Full-time Regular Director New York, NY, US

30+ days ago Requisition ID: 1553

Who we are:

At Preferred Travel Group, we champion the power of travel to inspire meaningful connections and enrich lives around the world. As a global family of brands and programs representing the finest independent hotels and resorts, we are united by a shared belief in authenticity, collaboration, and the value of independent spirit. Our culture reflects our ideology in action: people first, relationships at the center, and a commitment to creating lasting impact for our partners, our global community, and one another. When you join Preferred, you become part of a purpose-driven organization where ideas are welcomed, growth is encouraged, and your work contributes to shaping the future of travel.

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Why this role matters:

We are looking for a visionary, data-driven AI and product leader to help shape the future of digital experiences across Preferred Travel Group's global portfolio of independent luxury hotels. At PTG, the Digital Product organization is moving beyond traditional booking engines to create personalized, frictionless guest experiences that drive engagement, loyalty, and revenue. The Director of AI & Data Product will lead PTG's AI and data product strategy, owning the AI roadmap for customer-facing digital experiences, driving Generative Engine Optimization initiatives, and delivering AI-enabled conversational experiences that better understand customer intent, remember user preferences, and enhance personalization. Working closely with IT, Data, Engineering, and AI teams, this leader will help define the future of PTG's data platform architecture, governance, and activation strategy while ensuring that data and AI capabilities directly support business growth and customer value.

Success in this role comes from delivering AI-powered digital experiences that increase engagement, personalization, and conversion across PTG's owned channels. The Director will establish a clear and scalable AI and data product roadmap, ensuring data and AI capabilities are effectively leveraged to enhance customer experiences, drive revenue growth, and support strategic business objectives

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What you’ll deliver:

• Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) & Search Defense
  • Architect and execute PTG's GEO strategy, partnering with the Product Managers, stakeholders and IT resources. Drive LLM visibility for our hotels, offers, and loyalty program within the major LLMs.
  • Partner with the Content team to structure data specifically for AI ingestion and RAG architectures, including schema markup, structured content models, and entity disambiguation across the hotel portfolio.
  • Define and track GEO performance metrics, establishing PTG's methodology for measuring AI-driven discoverability.
• Commercial Data Platform & CDP Ownership
  • Own the product roadmap for PTG's customer data foundation and data as a product strategy, including understanding of a medallion architecture integrating booking, loyalty, clickstream, and marketing data.
  • Serve as the product owner of PTG's Customer Data Platform (CDP), overseeing the unified member profile layer that consolidates identity resolution, behavioral signals, and loyalty data into actionable segments for marketing, personalization, and AI model grounding.
  • Define the data products with key stakeholders including Marketing and IT for gold-layer outputs that serve downstream consumers: campaign activation, revenue analytics, loyalty operations, and AI/ML feature pipelines.
  • Support data governance and privacy compliance for the commercial platform, including DPIA maintenance, PII handling standards, and vendor data processing agreements, prioritizing the needs of GDPR, CCPA, and hospitality-sector obligations.
  • Partner closely with IT, Data, Engineering, and AI teams to maintain the architectural boundary between the data product and IT infrastructure, while aligning platform design, governance, and downstream activation needs across each environment.
• Own the roadmap and deployment of PTG's AI chat interfaces and assistants across web and mobile, for both usability and structured zero-party data collection.
• Integrate conversational interfaces with the loyalty platform and booking stack, enabling intent-driven recommendations, personalization and seamless booking.
• Operational AI & Automation
  • Identify and build internal AI tools that eliminate heavy manual operational processes across content, onboarding, loyalty operations, and member support.
  • Oversee the ongoing optimization content ingestion automation to dynamically update hotel content in Preferred’s owned channels.
  • Partner with I Prefer Member Services to deploy AI-driven deflection tools, measuring deflection rate, member satisfaction, and cost-per-contact impact.
• Lead organization insights on emerging AI technologies, LLM capabilities for AI in hospitality and loyalty, as they impact the digital journey.
• Vet and/or manage relationships with AI and data vendors, including CDP, analytics, and AI platform partners, compliance with PTG's data governance requirements.
• Prototype and pitch net-new AI capabilities that drive incremental revenue, operational savings, or meaningful improvements in guest personalization and loyalty engagement.

What you’ll bring to the team:

• 8+ years of experience in technical product management, with at least 2 years specifically focused on AI, machine learning, NLP, conversational UI, or data platform products.
• Practical understanding of Large Language Models, RAG architectures, prompt engineering, and how AI systems index, retrieve, and cite web and structured data.
• Hands-on product ownership experience with a commercial data platform or data warehouse environment, defining data products, working with dbt or similar transformation tooling, and managing the relationship between raw data ingestion and downstream analytics or AI consumers.
• Demonstrated experience with Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), understanding of identity resolution, unified profiles, segmentation, and how CDP outputs connect to personalization and campaign activation.
• Proven experience building and scaling consumer-facing AI products or advanced automation tools within an environment.
• Strong architectural understanding of modern data and AI stacks sufficient to guide engineering teams, including customer data foundations, event streaming, API-first integrations, and ML feature pipelines.
• Demonstrated ability to translate complex AI and data concepts into clear business value, ROI, operational savings, conversion lift, and loyalty engagement impact for non-technical executive audiences.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity with an entrepreneurial mindset: prototyping rapidly, defining metrics where none exist, and pivoting based on data.

What Would Make You Stand Out:

• Familiarity with data privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA) and experience maintaining DPIAs or equivalent compliance documentation for data-intensive platforms.
• Background working with clickstream data, behavioral analytics, and CDP vendor ecosystems (Amperity, Segment, mParticle, or equivalent).
• Experience with GEO, AEO, or structured data strategy for AI discoverability, including schema markup, entity-based content models, or LLM citation optimization.
• Familiarity with headless CMS platforms and how content architecture decisions affect both AI ingestion and front-end delivery.

Where you’ll thrive:

• You are comfortable operating in a rapidly evolving technology landscape, thrive on continuous learning, and bring a proactive approach to identifying opportunities for automation and efficiency.
• You enjoy leading multiple priorities in a fast-paced environment, balancing strategic thinking with disciplined execution.
• You are confident making well-informed decisions, taking calculated risks, and driving results with a strong sense of ownership and accountability.
• You communicate with clarity and conviction, working independently while maintaining strong follow-through and attention to detail when coordinating with others.

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Our Working Culture:

With our in-office philosophy, our associates are expected to be in the office at least three days per week, supporting a healthy balance between in-person collaboration and flexible remote work. We take pride in our vibrant and inclusive culture, which thrives on meaningful connection, shared purpose, and cross-functional teamwork. In-office engagement plays a vital role in fostering spontaneous collaboration, accelerating innovation, and strengthening relationships across teams. It also provides valuable opportunities for mentorship, professional development, and a deeper sense of community.

Please note: While the current expectation is a minimum of three days per week in the office, this may evolve over time in alignment with business needs and our continued commitment to culture-building

Disclaimer - This description reflects the general nature and level of the role. It is not intended to be an exhaustive list of responsibilities or requirements

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$155,000 - $175,000, actual compensation within this range will be determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise.