Data Science Practice Lead 1291 views

They are looking for a seasoned Data Science Practice Lead, who will be responsible for driving excellence in Analytics and Data Science across the whole company, with wide-ranging influence over how Data Science is practiced in our diverse community over 300+ people. They will impact their choice of tools, their documentation and training, career progression, and the development of their data infrastructure. Above all, they will have a chance to define the “Spotify Way” for Data Science, in partnership with other leaders in the Insights organization.

What You’ll Do

• • This person will lead a team dedicated to the Data Science practice, within their Platform Mission, working alongside the teams that build their data tools and infrastructure.
  • Working across their embedded community of data scientists and engineers — and partnering closely with central tooling and infrastructure teams — you’ll lead Spotify’s effort to minimize duplication and hours spent on discovering, generating and preparing data to a state where it’s optimized for insights.
  • By engaging across disciplines you’ll develop a practice that’s easy for others to adopt and is equally easy for others to contribute to. You’ll build and maintain an evolving set of shared principles, shared tools, shared knowledge and most importantly shared behaviors for how they produce and manage data for insights across the company.
  • To tackle the data for insights challenges at Spotify, they’ll need to work across the entire data preparation workflow, including generating data through instrumentation, normalizing data into easy to query tables and producing flat tables that are ready to analyze.
  • You’ll work with data scientists to cultivate a shared practice for defining data collection requirements across all of their experiences. You’ll partner with central tooling and infrastructure teams to make sure it’s trivially easy for these requirements to be implemented by product teams.
  • Work with dedicated data production teams to identify an opportunity to produce datasets centrally. You’ll be the lead designer for Spotify’s data, modeling data across the company and helping teams to identify and design data interoperable with their bounded context.
  • You’ll work closely with tooling and infrastructure teams to ensure they have the tools they need to make it easy to produce and manage data for insights. When the input is not enough, you’ll embed with their partners to help design, build or activate shared data, tooling and infrastructure.

Who You Are

• • You’re passionate about the role of model, analyst friendly data in maximizing a company’s potential as a learning organization. Your passion for good practice is infectious. As you continuously improve your own practice, Spotify’s practice will improve alongside you.
  • You’re collaborative. You work hands-on with a wide variety of teams to ensure that both the most recent needs of the community are reflected in their shared practice and that behaviors of the community are changing to adopt it. When there are competing shared practices you facilitate discussions, providing your experienced perspective where needed, in order to establish a single view, e.g. the guiding principles or when to use which practice. When infrastructure is missing or incomplete you surface the needs and work with infra teams to ensure that they are understood.
  • You’re innovative. You’re a builder. You show people the value of your ideas by bringing them to life in tangible, innovative ways. You work closely with central engineering and infrastructure teams to tackle the most complex challenges at Spotify that are addressed in a sustainable way.
  • You’re playful. You’re always looking for new ways to engage across disciplines to build engagement and cultivate a shared sense of ownership of the practice.
  • You’re sincere. As community lead, you take an active interest in your own development and the development of other data scientists across the organization.
  • You have 5+ years as a practicing data scientist, analyst or data/analytics engineer.
  • You have a high level of ability in data science languages such as SQL and Python and/or R.
  • The breadth of experience more important than expertise in one specific area.
  • You have previous experience leading data scientists in developing and adopting shared practice is essential (e.g. building an internal community of practice, contributing to open source)
  • You have extensive experience working with engineers, product managers and designers in a production environment to decide what data to collect and how to collect it, to enable the data science downstream.
  • You have (ideally) 4+ years experience with data modeling in a variety of contexts (e.g. web sites, applications, financial) and ideally in a variety of use cases (e.g. preparing data for your own ad hoc data science projects, enterprise data warehousing and/or modeling data for software applications).
  • You have (ideally) a strong command of Domain-Driven Design principles, with experience applying it to software or data design at an enterprise scale.

You are welcome at Spotify for who you are, no matter where you come from, what you look like, or what’s playing in your headphones. Their platform is for everyone, and so is their workplace. The more voices they have represented and amplified in their business, the more they will all thrive, contribute and be brilliant. So bring them your personal experience, your perspectives, and your background. It’s in their differences that they will find the power to keep revolutionizing the way the world listens.