Senior Advertising Operations Manager

About us

We are champions of rail, inspired to build a greener, more sustainable future of travel. Trainline enables millions of travellers to find and book the best value tickets across carriers, fares, and journey options through our highly rated mobile app, website, and B2B partner channels. 

Great journeys start with Trainline 🚄 

Now Europe’s number 1 downloaded rail app, with over 125 million monthly visits and £5.9 billion in annual ticket sales, we collaborate with 270+ rail and coach companies in over 40 countries. We want to create a world where travel is as simple, seamless, eco-friendly and affordable as it should be. 

Today, we're a FTSE 250 company driven by our incredible team of over 1,000 Trainliners from 50+ nationalities, based across London, Paris, Barcelona, Milan, Edinburgh and Madrid. With our focus on growth in the UK and Europe, now is the perfect time to join us on this high-speed journey. 

About the Role

Trainline Advertising plays a central role in our monetisation strategy, connecting brands with rail and coach travellers at high-intent moments across the customer journey - from planning through to travelling.

We’re looking for an experienced, detail-oriented Senior Advertising Operations Manager to own and evolve Trainline’s advertising operations and programmatic ecosystem. This role is accountable for campaign delivery, ad tech performance, yield optimisation and the ongoing development of a scalable, privacy-first advertising platform across direct and programmatic demand.

You’ll act as the operational backbone and subject-matter expert for Trainline Advertising, working closely with Client Success, Product, Engineering and Data teams to ensure advertising is reliable, compliant, performant and resilient to changes in the wider ad tech ecosystem, while delivering a strong customer experience.

Key Responsibilities

Advertising Operations & Delivery

• Own end-to-end ad operations across direct and programmatic campaigns, directly and through the team, including setup, trafficking, pacing, optimisation and post-campaign reporting.

• Ensure consistently high-quality ad delivery across formats, placements and platforms, meeting defined operational standards and SLAs.

• Act as the primary operational point of escalation for campaign issues, leading troubleshooting across delivery, tracking and performance.

Ad Tech Stack Ownership

• Own the day-to-day operation and optimisation of Trainline’s ad tech stack, including Google Ad Manager (GAM), SSPs, consent frameworks and QA processes.

• Set, maintain and evolve operational standards for ad delivery, measurement, quality and reliability across Trainline Advertising.

• Lead integrations with new ad tech partners, formats and demand sources in collaboration with Product and Engineering teams.

• Drive improvements in automation, tooling, documentation and processes to support scale and operational efficiency.

Programmatic Yield & Marketplace Optimisation

• Lead programmatic yield management, balancing short-term revenue performance with long-term marketplace health and customer experience.

• Monitor performance across demand sources and formats, identifying opportunities to improve fill, CPMs, demand quality and overall yield.

• Evaluate, test and onboard new programmatic partners, technologies and monetisation opportunities.

Cross-Functional Leadership & Influence

• Work closely with Client Success to support campaign execution, forecasting, troubleshooting and client delivery.

• Act as the advertising operations subject-matter expert and functional lead, influencing product and engineering roadmaps to ensure scalable, high-quality monetisation is embedded early.

• Collaborate with Data and Strategy teams to improve reporting, measurement frameworks and actionable insight.

Team Leadership & Capability

• Line-manage and develop an Ad Operations Manager, providing clear direction, coaching and performance feedback.

• Set operational priorities, ways of working and quality standards across the ad operations function.

• Build resilience and scalability by reducing single points of failure and improving documentation and process maturity.

What You’ll Need

• 6+ years’ experience in ad operations, programmatic advertising or ad tech roles.

• Deep hands-on experience with Google Ad Manager, SSPs, DSPs and programmatic delivery models.

• Strong understanding of consent management frameworks (e.g. GDPR, TCF v2.0) and privacy-first advertising.

• Proven ability to manage complex ad operations with a high bar for quality and reliability.

• Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills, with comfort working across data, technology and commercial teams.

• Excellent stakeholder management skills, able to translate between technical and commercial audiences.

More information:

Enjoy fantastic perks like private healthcare & dental insurance, a generous work from abroad policy, 2-for-1 share purchase plans, an EV Scheme to further reduce carbon emissions, extra festive time off, and excellent family-friendly benefits. 

We prioritise career growth with clear career paths, transparent pay bands, personal learning budgets, and regular learning days. Jump on board and supercharge your career from day one! 

We're operate a hybrid model to work and ask that Trainliners work from the office a minimum of 60% of their time over a 12-week period. We also have a 28-day Work from Abroad policy.

Our values represent the things that matter most to us and what we live and breathe everyday, in everything we do: 

• 💭 Think Big - We're building the future of rail 

• ✔️ Own It - We focus on every customer, partner and journey 

• 🤝  Travel Together - We're one team 

• ♻️ Do Good - We make a positive impact 

We know that having a diverse team makes us better and helps us succeed. And we mean all forms of diversity - gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, nationality and diversity of thought. That's why we're committed to creating inclusive places to work, where everyone belongs and differences are valued and celebrated.

Interested in finding out more about what it's like to work at Trainline? Why not check us out on LinkedIn, Instagram and Glassdoor!