Senior Director, Operational Excellence & Quality Improvement - Bangalore / Mumbai

Company Description

At Nielsen, we are passionate about our work to power a better media future for all people by providing powerful insights that drive client decisions and deliver extraordinary results. Our talented, global workforce is dedicated to capturing audience engagement with content - wherever and whenever it’s consumed. Together, we are proudly rooted in our deep legacy as we stand at the forefront of the media revolution. When you join Nielsen, you will join a dynamic team committed to excellence, perseverance, and the ambition to make an impact together. We champion you, because when you succeed, we do too. We enable your best to power our future.

Position summary

The Senior Director, Operational Excellence & Quality Improvement leads the strategic enhancement of Gracenote’s end-to-end global operating model. This executive establishes robust governance, metrics, quality systems, and cross-functional alignment to drive customer trust, data accuracy, scalability, operational efficiency, and resilience.

Translating growth, automation, and content-modernization strategies into high-impact operating plans, this role leads cross-functional teams across Content, Product, Engineering, Customer Success, Commercial, and Strategy to champion data-informed decisions and continuous improvement.

Key responsibilities

• Define and execute the global operational excellence and quality strategy across Gracenote.
• Establish high-impact performance governance, risk management, QA protocols, and continuous improvement frameworks.
• Align business goals with initiative portfolios, resource planning, and clear performance outcomes.
• Proactively mitigate operational, technology, and transformation risks before they impact customers.
• Own the end-to-end quality framework, including SOPs, audits, monitoring, alerts, and process QA.
• Lead incident management, root-cause analysis (RCA), and corrective/preventive action (CAPA) tracking.
• Eliminate customer-impacting defects, rework, and process variation at the root cause level.
• Build executive dashboards to track quality trends, SLA compliance, defect severity, and remediation progress.
• Partner with Product & Engineering on release readiness, UAT, change control, and post-release reviews.
• Drive data-driven transformation projects leveraging automation, process discovery, and change management.
• Advance human-in-the-loop (HITL) automation to scale operations, improve speed, and ensure precision.
• Coach, develop, and inspire high-performing global teams, embedding continuous learning and inclusion.

Measures of success

• Measurable reduction in customer defects, quality escapes, recurring incidents, and unnecessary rework.
• Increased RCA completion velocity, CAPA effectiveness, SLA compliance, and risk resolution rates.
• Enhanced throughput, cycle times, capacity management, productivity, and automation adoption.
• Higher customer satisfaction, operational resilience, operational transparency, and organizational capabilities.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of progressive experience in operations, quality, process excellence, transformation, content/data operations, product operations, or a related field, including significant leadership experience.
• Experience leading through multiple managers and/or senior functional leaders in a complex, global organization.
• Demonstrated success building operational excellence, quality-management, continuous-improvement, or business-performance systems.
• Strong knowledge of QA, process governance, root-cause analysis, corrective and preventive action, risk management, change management, KPIs, and executive reporting.
• Track record leading technology-enabled transformation, automation, process redesign, or platform modernization.
• Exceptional communication, influence, facilitation, decision-making, and stakeholder-management skills.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience required; advanced degree or relevant certification preferred.
• Media, entertainment, metadata, data services, digital products, or complex content/technology experience preferred.

Leadership profile

• A systems thinker and pragmatic operator who moves comfortably between strategy and execution; creates clarity without waiting for certainty; balances quality, speed, efficiency, cost, and customer outcomes; and leaves teams stronger than they found them.

Additional Information

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