Head of Data
Leads data organization, defining strategy from data collection to AI features, driving technical execution, team building, and cross-functional collaboration to enable data-driven decisions and AI-powered products. Requires 12+ years in data fields with 5+ years leadership and deep ML/AI expertise.
About the job
Responsibilities
Technical Leadership & Strategy
- Define and drive the company-wide data strategy end-to-end, from raw data collection to user-facing AI features or internal decision making.
- Ensure teams have capabilities for sound data-driven decisions and build platforms/frameworks for high standards.
- Advance transformation into insights- and AI-powered product with differentiated value proposition.
- Make critical architecture and systems design decisions for scalability, maintainability, security, and performance.
- Stay current with technology trends, especially modern AI, and evaluate/adopt beneficial innovations.
Hands-On Execution
- Contribute to major technical components, critical feature-launches, code, or insights deep dives.
- Involved in solution design for high-complexity or high-risk data or AI investments.
- Lead or participate in technical deep-dives for cross-team initiatives.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Collaborate with Engineering, Product, and Design to integrate data capabilities.
- Ensure data & AI platforms empower user-facing teams for high velocity.
- Represent Data to executive team, communicate insights, tradeoffs, risks, timelines.
- Collaborate on budget, resource allocation, technology investments.
Team Building, Mentorship & Management
- Build, grow, and mentor senior leaders (managers and ICs).
- Recruit and retain top data talent, define hiring strategy, interviewing, onboarding.
- Foster culture of learning, decision quality, ownership, psychological safety, accountability.
- Lead adoption of AI-driven tools for productivity.
Process, Governance & Scaling
- Establish best practices across data lifecycle (instrumentation, data engineering, insights, experimentation, ML/AI validation).
- Maintain effectiveness/reliability of AI and insights solutions with monitoring, alerting, remediation.
- Partner with Product and Engineering to evolve org structure for growth.
Requirements
- 12+ years in data-related fields (data science, data engineering, ML engineering) with at least 5+ years leading managers or directors in growing, fast-paced environments.
- Track record of designing and launching large-scale user-facing data or AI-driven product capabilities with measurable impact.
- Track record of transforming organizational culture to data-driven, including self-service insights and experimentation.
- Deep technical expertise in data science, ML, AI, and relevant engineering (data and AI platforms).
- Proven track record of direct technical contributions as a leader.
- Excellent leadership, mentoring, people-management skills; ability to recruit/retain strong talent.
- Strong collaboration, communication; simplify technical issues for executives/cross-functional teams.
Nice-to-Haves
- Experience scaling teams across multiple geographies.
- Prior experience in SaaS/consumer tech.
Compensation
- Base salary targeted at $320,000-$340,000 for roles based in San Francisco and Los Angeles (final offers depend on location, experience, expertise, role scope).
Skills
Data Science, Machine Learning, AI, Data Engineering, Python, SQL, Scalable Systems, Experimentation, Self-Service Analytics, Ml Platforms
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