Senior Director Executive Roles — the feeder tier to VP
Sr. Director is a distinct tier with its own promotion path — typically one step below VP and one step above Director, with 731 active roles at last snapshot.
Top role types
What this category covers
The Senior Director tier is narrower than the broader Director category. At most mid-to-large companies, Senior Director sits one step below VP and one step above Director — and the distinction matters. A Sr. Director at a 500-person company typically has materially more scope than a Director at a 5,000-person company, even though "Director" is a broader category.
At flatter organizations — often growth-stage companies or lean functional orgs — a Senior Director may carry VP-equivalent authority without the VP title. The classifier weighs reporting structure and functional ownership, not just title prefix, to resolve these.
With approximately 731 active roles at last snapshot — compared to VP's 4,918 and Director's 3,380 — the Sr. Director tier has lower total volume but often higher concentration of strategic-track candidates who are on a defined path to VP. The Technology industry accounts for 433 of these roles (59%), reflecting where the Sr. Director tier is most established.
Sample Jobs (10 of 731)
| Title & Company | Location |
|---|---|
| Senior Director of Fiduciary Administration Westport One The role involves serving as the resident expert on fiduciary policy, procedures, risk management, and decision-making, partnering with senior executives, and ensuring compliance with fiduciary, legal, and regulatory requirements. Sr Director | Chicago, Illinois, United States Unknown |
| Senior Director, Strategy & Operations Salesforce The role involves strategic planning, operational excellence, cross-functional alignment, executive communications, and AI strategy enablement. Sr Director | Washington - Seattle Hybrid |
| Sr. Director, Procurement Operations & Bogota Site Lead, Orthopedics Johnson & Johnson Responsible for delivering best-in-class experience, business value delivery, compliance, and continuous improvement across Global Operations Procurement. Also serves as the Bogota Site Lead. Sr Director | Bogotá Distrito Capital, Colombia Hybrid |
| Senior Director, Field Medical Analytics Bristol Myers Squibb Lead global strategy, development, and execution of advanced analytics capabilities for Field Medical organizations at Bristol Myers Squibb. Sr Director | Princeton, NJ, US Hybrid |
| Senior Director Device Quality Bristol Myers Squibb The Senior Director, Device Quality provides global strategic leadership and accountability for Quality across medical devices, drug device combination products, companion diagnostics, and precision medicine–enabling platforms. Sr Director | Madison, NJ, US Hybrid |
| Senior Leader ITC, CES GE Aerospace Responsible for setting strategic vision for export authorizations and overseeing ITC risk area processes for Commercial Engines and Systems business. Sr Director | Unknown Unknown |
| Senior Product Owner - Head of Genesys Cloud Intrum Lead the next phase of Intrum's contact center journey with Genesys Cloud, focusing on value creation, governance, and new capabilities. Sr Director | Stockholm, Sweden Onsite |
| Senior Director, Risk and Underwriting (Payments/Fintech) NMI The role involves strategic leadership and operational accountability in risk management and underwriting for a payments platform. It includes managing risk frameworks, underwriting policies, and financial institution relationships. Sr Director | Remote, US Remote |
| Senior Director Finance, GTM Ethos The Senior Director, GTM will own financial strategy and performance management for Ethos' GTM business, serving as a financial thought partner to leaders across Marketing, Product, and Sales. Sr Director | Remote US Remote |
| Sr. Director, Accounting Operations Wonder Lead and scale core financial functions, oversee A/R, Billing, A/P, and Payroll, ensure operational excellence and integration of acquired entities. Sr Director | New York, NY Hybrid |
How classification gets to this category
Senior Director classification is one of the most title-exact in the system:
- Exact title matching. "Senior Director" and "Sr. Director" (including the abbreviated form with the period) are both recognized. The classifier does not infer Sr. Director status from context alone — the title must be present or signaled by a near-exact variant. "Senior Director of Engineering," "Sr. Director, Operations," and "Senior Director, Revenue Cycle" all match.
- Compensation validation. $220K+ base is the floor for Sr. Director auto-classification. Roles below this threshold with Sr. Director titles are held for manual review — at some company sizes, a "Senior Director" title carries analyst-level scope and compensation.
- Reporting and team-size secondary signals. Sr. Directors typically report to a VP or SVP, occasionally to the C-suite directly at smaller orgs. Team size of 10–50 ICs and functional budget of $5M–$50M are common signals. Roles reporting to a Director (peer-level reporting) are flagged for review. See the AI Classification page for the full pipeline.
How matching works for your search
Matching on Senior Director tier is a seniority-specific filter that isolates this exact promotion band — above Director, below VP.
Example: select Sr. Director tier + Technology industry and your inbox shows Senior Director roles at tech companies only — not VP Engineering (VP-tier), not Director of Engineering (Director-tier), but the Senior Director of Engineering and Sr. Director of Platform layer at tech companies. The tier and industry must both pass.
Because Sr. Director volume is lower than VP or Director, adding a role-type filter can narrow the result set significantly. If you find the result set too small after filtering, consider expanding to include both Sr. Director + Director tiers — the adjacent tiers often share candidate profiles, especially at growth-stage companies where the two levels are close in authority.
Remote mix