Head of Data

What is Avo?

Today’s successful businesses have the best user experience, and rely on analytics every day for product and go-to-market strategy. While there are plenty of customer analytics solutions out there, a problem rarely talked about is that managing analytics releases is a complete and utter pain. Product data is uniquely complex because it’s ever-changing, to keep up with ever-changing products. Teams either have terrible data, or immense overhead in planning, implementing and verifying analytics releases with every product update—with manual tracking plans. And even when teams throw days into that overhead, they still release bad event tracking, with inconsistent and duplicate events, discrepancies between platforms, missing properties, inconsistent property types etc. All of this causes data people to hate their jobs and it causes companies to mistrust their data, or worse, make wrong decisions.

It’s time to change that.

Avo is the leading data governance platform to plan and govern data quality for event based analytics. Avo enables cross-functional collaboration on proactive data management, so data people, PMs and product engineers can collaborate to ship better event tracking faster. Avo makes data cultures better at leading product organizations—such as Patreon, Adobe, Fender, Sixt, Condé Nast, DeliveryHero, Doodle, CultureAmp—and integrates with today’s best data tools—such as Segment, Rudderstack, mParticle, Mixpanel, Amplitude, etc. Read how Patreon went from spending 3-4 days on every analytics release, to 30-60 minutes using Avo—with more reliable data. Read what our customers say.

We are a team of skilled developers and data scientists, experienced with building successful consumer products and shaping high performing data cultures. We have built thriving data cultures and solved data quality at scale before at QuizUp (100m users, backed by Sequoia and Tencent). We have now built Avo to solve that for the rest of the world.

We are supported by world class investors that we admire, including Y Combinator, GGV and Heavybit, as well as influential data and engineering professionals who share our vision.

What will you be doing?

Join us to spearhead the Avo data community and how we use data at Avo:

As the team behind Avo you can imagine that we care deeply about our own data and data culture.* We believe everyone in the company should be able to leverage data to make decisions. We also believe it’s important to walk in our customers’ shoes.

• If you ask Stef, our CEO, our data culture is the dream for anyone to join as the first data practitioner, because you won’t have to start by convincing everyone about the merits of data and data quality.

While all of us at Avo leverage data in our day-to-day work and contribute to the data ecosystem, you will have outsized ownership and impact as the only team member fully dedicated to data and the community we build around Avo and our vision. This is an opportunity to shape and spearhead how that looks at Avo and grow with the role. You’ll communicate your process, identify opportunities for improvement, and build our foundation, so we can attract more talented people as we scale. We see this role as having three pillars:

1. Spearhead how we use data at Avo:

• Empower fast and good decision making with data. You will work closely with the Founders (including Stef, our CEO, who’s been in data for over a decade), Product, and Go-to-market teams. You’ll do deep-dive analyses where needed; investigate and narrate insights for leadership, our board, and investors; improve our data infrastructure; iterate on how data flows between our tools; and generally keep us on our toes. We want you to proactively discover insights, as well as be the data ninja people can go to for advice and share how we do things with the wider community.

• Use the best tools: You’ll be using a variety of data technologies because we leverage—or at least try—the tools our customers use, including technologies like Avo, Mixpanel/Amplitude/PostHog, Segment/Rudderstack/mParticle, dbt, BigQuery and so many more.

2. Champion Avo and foster our community:

• Foster our community: You’ll work closely with our CEO to foster a community inspired by Avo and our vision to build better data cultures. You’ll drive our strategy around the data professionals’ love of Avo and Avo’s participation in the data ecosystem. You’ll support and grow Avo's community by engaging with and learning from Avo customers and the wider data community. We focus on raising awareness about Avo by rolling up our sleeves, contributing to the ecosystem, and enabling others to become data culture advocates (“Avocates” ).

• Support community members: We love helping people build reliable data and thriving data cultures. We have an incredible community and customers. So while the internal Avo team is small, you’ll have an opportunity to work closely with the best data professionals, product managers and developers in the world, who are building world-class products. The whole Avo team engages with our community, but as Avo’s only full-time data practitioner you’ll have outsized ownership and impact to provide technical and best practices guidance, based on our experience at Avo and from working with our customers. By sharing content and facilitating conversations in our community, you might help people build their tracking plans, set up Avo, choose their data stack, and strategize how they improve their data culture.

• Lead the conversation: You’ll be hands-on in facilitating knowledge sharing by organizing meetups and authoring content. You’ll spark conversations about Avo, proactive data management, event instrumentation, latest advancements in data, and best practices. You’ll be an active and authentic participant in the data community where we gather, online or offline, at conferences, meetups, Slack communities, in contributed articles, blogs, podcasts, videos, and social media.

3. Influence our strategy in product, go-to-market and community:

• You’ll support Avo’s product, engineering and go-to-market efforts by sharing your learnings as a data practitioner and from engaging in the Avo community and the wider data community. You’ll channel feedback to the Avo team and work closely with the Founders, Product and Go-to-market teams to shape what we build and how we tell people about it.

Who are we looking for?

• Builder that makes stuff happen: We're looking for someone who has a strong appetite for making things happen and figuring things out.

• Moves Fast: As an early stage startup, we need to strike a balance between moving fast and building sustainably. We think the best way to do so is to minimize scope and prioritize ruthlessly. We're building for the long haul.

• Results Driven: Someone who focuses on the purpose of the task at hand and has a strategy in place on how we’ll deliver the results to our users before diving into execution mode.

• Open to travel: Data events happen all over the world. We’re looking for someone with an appetite to travel, or adjust to various time zones to attend a remote conference on the other side of the world.

What do I get?

• Structured compensation: We don’t believe your compensation should be based on your ability to negotiate, when that’s not at all what everyone specializes in. So we make sure salaries are benchmarked and normalized based on your role, level, and location.

• Equity: It’s important to us that all Avo team members can feel invested in the company’s success, so everyone has equity.

• Paid time off: We want you to take at least 24 days off per year

• Generous parental leave

• Private medical insurance where your government doesn’t handle that for you. Including dental and vision.

• 401k contributions, matching 4%.

• Budget for home office or co-working space

• Top-of-the-line equipment: Budget for choosing the equipment that makes you productive.

What is it like to work at Avo?

Below are some of the things that shape our culture.

• We share Core Virtues as a team. Our virtues represent our values that we transmit into our culture and day-to-day work. If you like these, you may enjoy working with us. (And if you don’t like them, please tell us what we’re missing in our thinking!)

• World-class team: Join a high-performing, fast-moving, international startup backed by world-class investors, including Y Combinator, GGV and Heavybit.

• Respectful & diverse culture: A company culture with mutual respect, passion for transparency and inclusion, all hands on deck, and a sense of shared responsibility.

• Work from anywhere: Avo is remote-first and async-first and has been since we finished Y Combinator in 2019. You can be based anywhere in the US, Iceland or Europe, or even in all those places. We maintain availability for synchronous comms and fast decision-making from 3-5pm GMT. We strive for clear written communication that drives fast resolution.

• Respect for focus time: We have meeting free days, are async first, and communicate accordingly.

• Regular team offsites: We all meet somewhere in the world regularly (we’re all headed to Iceland in March)—when COVID allows —with carbon offsetting for work travel with Project Wren

• Opportunity to learn and grow: We are a team that cares about continuous improvement for ourselves and our company, and love helping each other learn and grow.

• Early at a growing team building something new: We are a small team that work tightly together. Joining our journey early, you'll have an opportunity to be hands-on and shape not just our business, but the company and culture: who we work with, and how we work together.

What is the interview and hiring process like?

Not sure you meet 100% of our qualifications? Have an untraditional background? Apply anyway!

There are many roads leading up to being Head of Data. Our team is already a mix of self-taught and formally educated people. Don’t self-select out!

You’ll answer questions that relate to this role in a written form. After the application deadline, all answers will be anonymized, randomized and then reviewed by a panel of reviewers. In order to prevent bias we will not look at your CV until your answers have been anonymously reviewed and the shortlist has been drafted. Read about our commitment to hire talent of diverse backgrounds.

If you are shortlisted, we’ll invite you to the next step, which will include a project (that we don’t expect you to spend more than an hour or two on) and three 1h interviews designed to understand whether we’re the right fit for each other at this moment—including a reverse interview where you’ll get to ask us what you want know. We can group those together into one session or distribute over different days. Also, we love receiving and giving feedback, so you'll be able to see how well you performed at each stage of the application process.

Expected duration of this application process is 6-8 weeks. (But hopefully faster )

Avo pledges to be an organization that reflects the globally diverse audience that our product serves. We believe that in addition to hiring the best talent, a diversity of perspectives, ideas, and cultures leads to the creation of better products and services. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, or gender identity.