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VP of Data at Profitably in New York, NY

We are a venture-backed startup in NYC. We’ve had nearly 3,000 small businesses sign up for our service, and we’ve been featured in Fortune, Inc, Forbes, FoxBusiness, AmEx Open Forum, The Huffington Post, Crains, and other great media outlets.

We have invested in world-class engineering and design talent, but we need help on the data side of the operation. (You will be the 6th person in the company with commensurate equity/responsibilities.)

As things stand, we have a multi-tenant SaaS offering that delivers insights to startups and small businesses using backbone.js and Ruby on Rails with some pretty clever home-grown enhancements. On the backend we are running Postgres for persistent storage, Mongo for document-based storage and ETL staging, and redis for key-value stores and queueing.

The appeal of this role is the opportunity to build something users really need that draws from the best aspects of traditional business intelligence, big data, NoSQL, real time analytics, and statistics. Profitably is building the future of data analytics with a respectful nod to what’s come before, and you will be the tip of the spear.

Responsibilities

This position is an opportunity for an engineer to take ownership of a significant technical area of a fast-growing company. We will match the responsibilities to the candidate, but opportunities include:

  • Owning the data strategy
    • Should we replace Postgres with InfoBright?
    • What’s the appropriate level of health monitoring and process auditing?
  • Prioritizing customer-facing analytics
    • How would our user base want to view CAC and LTV metrics?
    • Is it worth merging in a Google Analytics feed to automate conversion metrics for the Plan vs. Actual area?
  • Owning the data modeling/semantic framework
    • If we continue to use Ruby methods for defining metrics, do we lose on reporting flexibility or gain on design/engineering cycle time?
    • Should we implement a ruby-based MDX interpreter or consider a Mondrian layer?
  • Owning the analytics framework
    • We currently use a “pragmatic” trigger-based caching strategy for customer-facing analytics that are too complex to run on demand
    • We would love for someone smart to implement something more elegant, performant, testable, and quick to engineer against
  • Owning ETL and RESTful data acquisition
    • Underwhelmed with Pentaho and Talend, we have broken ground on a DRY/agile Ruby-based ETL library that stages raw data in Mongo
    • We would love for someone smart to grow this into something more elegant, performant, testable, and quick to engineer against (or build something from scratch!)

We think these are great opportunities, but we’re also open to the idea that your insights are vastly superior. Just so we’re clear, YOU get to drive this process as we sprint towards a world-class solution.

    Compensation

    • Cash compensation: "Competitive" for a venture-backed start-up
    • Benefits: “More than competitive” for any startup
    • 100% coverage of health insurance premiums
    • $2500 spend-how-you-like budget for your computer/IT setup
    • Equity compensation: “More than competitive” for a venture-backed start-up

    Our goal is to make it tough to join our company, but once you do, you’re family. We are dead serious about our mission, and we only bring people in who want to play a pivotal role in its success.

    Qualifications

    Most of these items are negotiable depending on the candidate, but to give you an idea of what we’re looking for:

    • Experience working with real data. Dirty, messy, @&$% data. We aren’t parsing Apache logs, we’re working with real-life, human-entered garbage.
    • Experience with and strong opinions about when/how to use traditional and new data technologies such as Postgres/MySQL/SQL Server, MongoDB/CouchDB, Cassandra/Voldemort, Redis, Hadoop/Hive, Mondrian, InfoBright/Vertica, MemSQL/Volt, etc.
    • Knowledge of Business Intelligence best practices (even if we choose to ignore them!), statistics, and enough DBA knowledge/skills to effectively manage an outside contractor as required
    • Hunger to work autonomously, to take something and rip its arm off Grendel-style, to work both quickly and smartly, to iterate like mad, and to build something people really need
    • Preferred: Experience with our existing stack and working environment, including Ruby on Rails, Git, dynamic languages, agile methodologies, financial analysis, and distributed workers