Senior Director (m/f/d) Content Distribution & Discovery (Publishing)

Department: Science

Start: as soon as possible

Vertragsdauer: fixed-term for 2 years

Arbeitszeit: full time

Tasks

Your role & your impact

Strategic Ownership

• Define the long-term vision and strategy for content discoverability, distribution, as well as customer access and audience engagement across the scientific and educational journal, book publishing portfolio.
• Lead and own the strategic development for Thieme's online journal and book content discoverability and dissemination ecosystem, spanning metadata, taxonomy and future platform positioning, aligned with journal product strategies.
• Overall accountable for business outcomes on content discoverability, usage maximization and quality engagement, customer satisfaction, operational efficiency in an AI-driven environment.

Performance and Team Leadership

• Lead, develop, and inspire the Content Distribution & Discovery team – a team of specialists, fostering a culture of performance, accountability, innovation, and operational excellence.
• Own budget, investment decisions, resource allocation, vendor strategy, and systematic capability development.
• Define governance, metadata policies, quality standards, and operational frameworks.
• Drive content discovery and distribution transformation and modernization programs collaboratively.
• Define KPIs and drive continuous improvement across discoverability, engagement, metadata quality, and audience growth.

Stakeholder & Partner Management

• Establish and maintain strategic relationships across discovery services, indexing providers, accessibility and content delivery initiatives and other industry partners.
• Collaborate across Publishing, Product, Technology, Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success to deliver business outcomes.
• Represent Thieme's interests in relevant industry associations and committees.

Profile

• Minimum of 5 years’ proven leadership experience in digital products, platform management, or related fields, ideally within scholarly publishing, STM, or comparable content-driven environments.
• Strong understanding of scholarly communication, content dissemination, research workflows, digital customer journeys, and the evolving impact of AI and search technologies on content discovery and engagement.
• Proven ability to develop and execute business strategies in complex, evolving markets by combining business needs, customer perspectives, technical expertise, and specialized publishing knowledge into a clear strategic direction.
• Experience with metadata, taxonomy, discoverability, indexing, content platforms, or related digital publishing infrastructures, combined with a data-driven, analytical, and commercially minded approach to decision-making.
• Ability to quickly understand different business models, workflows, systems, dependencies, and interactions, while confidently challenging the status quo and driving continuous improvement.
• Strong leadership track record, including driving results, building effective teams, advancing problem solving, managing conflict, balancing ambiguity, and developing team members for future career growth.
• Excellent prioritization and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively with a wide range of personalities and seniority levels in an international and culturally diverse environment.
• Fluent English skills, both written and spoken, and flexibility to travel when needed.

Desirable

• German language skills would be a bonus
• Experience with platform migrations and vendor management.
• Knowledge of academic (STM) publishing in general and Open Access publishing in particular

We offer

• We provide a collaborative and empowering work environment
• We value winning ideas and a proactive attitude
• You will work in a reputable and employee-friendly family business that encourages open communication
• We operate a hybrid work setup at our Stuttgart office; we are open to other arrangements as well

Additional Information

Carina Hodruß

Talent Acquisition Manager

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Source: Statistisches Bundesamt (Destatis), table; dl-de/by-2-0; StarIn's calculation