Head of Data

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).