Sr. Digital Strategic Operations Manager, Spend Management (Contractor)

Role Description

This role is a contract assignment at Palo Alto Networks. Contractors will not be employed by Palo Alto Networks but through our trusted staffing partners.  

In this critical contract role, you will serve as the Sr. Digital Strategic Operations Manager for Spend Management within the DSO team. As a key contractor, you will be the engine driving transformation for our digital marketing budget processes. While your primary mandate is to own and optimize the digital spend, you will also play a highly collaborative role in supporting the overall global marketing budget. You aren't just managing spreadsheets; you are a builder of financial systems and a driver of fiscal discipline. This role sits at the intersection of digital marketing strategy, finance, and procurement, responsible for ensuring our digital organization is fiscally optimized, while providing structural support for the broader marketing org. By building and implementing disciplined marketing investment governance processes during this contract engagement, you will ensure that every dollar spent is strategically allocated, meticulously tracked, and directly contributing to measurable business outcomes.

• Location: Santa Clara, CA (Hybrid 3X a week to office)
• Duration: 12 months

Key Responsibilities

• Digital Budget Ownership & Marketing Support: Act as the primary financial steward for the digital marketing budget. Partnering directly with Finance and the overall Marketing Budget lead to support centralized budgeting frameworks, ensuring both digital and global marketing execution strictly align with corporate financial targets.
• Marketing Investment Governance: Implement disciplined marketing investment governance across the digital organization (and support these efforts globally) to optimize budget allocation, refine vendor strategy, and provide total visibility into ROI and performance metrics.
• Dynamic Reallocation: Monitor real-time digital budget pacing and campaign performance to facilitate the dynamic reallocation of capital. Recommend reallocation of funds proactively to high-performing digital initiatives, platforms, or regions to maximize business impact and pipeline velocity.
• Vendor Consolidation & Strategy: Drive a rigorous digital, MarTech, and agency vendor simplification strategy alongside Procurement. Lead vendor consolidation efforts, manage contract negotiations, and optimize our digital vendor portfolio to maximize the working-to-non-working spend ratio.
• Financial Transformation & Risk Management: Lead the financial strategy for high-priority transformation initiatives (e.g., M&A integrations, digital enterprise rollouts) with a focus on mitigating financial risk, merging complex digital budgets, and delivering measurable cost synergies.
• Technology Investment Management: Co-manage the MarTech and Data Governance Councils from a purely financial perspective, ensuring that all tool and platform investments are thoroughly vetted, aligned with our digital budget, and delivering a proven return on investment.

Required Qualifications

• Experience: 10+ years of experience in Marketing Operations, Financial Operations, or Business Strategy leadership within a global enterprise technology company, with a strict focus on digital budget architecture and marketing spend management.
• Deep Financial Acumen: Advanced proficiency in multi-million dollar digital budget management, OPEX forecasting, ROI analysis, and financial modeling within a marketing context, with the ability to roll up budgets into broader departmental financial plans.
• Enterprise Literacy: Comprehensive understanding of SaaS business models, modern digital demand generation, and the operational and financial complexities of global enterprise marketing.
• Stakeholder Influence: Ability to build deep relationships and act as an influential consultant/contractor to senior leaders without direct authority, acting as the ultimate bridge between Digital Marketing, overarching Marketing Operations, Finance, and Procurement.
• Accountability Driver: Extremely comfortable driving financial accountability with senior marketing leaders, enforcing procurement policies firmly but collaboratively.
• Data-Driven Mindset: The analytical rigor to find the "ROI story" in complex digital spend data and productize financial reporting for real-time visibility.
• Discretion: Absolute integrity and the ability to handle highly sensitive information regarding organizational changes, budget cuts, and financial performance.
• Executive Storytelling: Exceptional ability to tell a compelling story through financial data and present complex budgetary concepts, risks, and opportunities to executive audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

• Proven success stepping into complex, fast-paced contract or consulting roles and delivering immediate structural value.
• Experience thriving in 'transformation' environments where financial models, vendor landscapes, and digital budget parameters are being built or restructured in real-time.
• A highly proactive mindset—identifying digital budget leakage, MarTech redundancies, or financial risks before they reach leadership and presenting them alongside potential solutions.
• Demonstrated ability to not just fix immediate financial discrepancies, but to build systemic processes and guardrails to prevent them from reoccurring.

Compensation

The compensation offered for this position will depend on qualifications, experience, and work location.  For candidates who receive an offer,this is the pay range that Magnit (the staffing agency) reasonably expects to pay for this position: $80/hour to $85/hour. Please note that the compensation information in this posting reflects the hourly wage only and does not include benefits.  Magnit offers Medical, Dental, Vision and 401K. Magnit is not able to provide assistance to candidates requiring sponsorship or a visa for this position.     

Information about Palo Alto Networks

At Palo Alto Networks®, everything starts and ends with our mission:
Being the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life.
We have the vision of a world where each day is safer and more secure than the one before. These aren’t easy goals to accomplish — but we’re not here for easy. We’re here for better. We are a company built on the foundation of challenging and disrupting the way things are done, and we’re looking for innovators who are as committed to shaping the future of cybersecurity as we are.