Head of Data Science

About the Company

Craft is a supplier intelligence company helping organizations accelerate data-informed business decisions. Our unique, proprietary data platform tracks thousands of real-time signals across millions of companies globally, delivering best in class monitoring and insight into global supply chains, among other company cohorts. Our clients, including Fortune 100 companies, government and military agencies, SMEs, asset management groups, and others, use our technology for supply chain intelligence, market intelligence and related use cases. Through our modular, secure, customizable portal, our clients can monitor any company they are working with and drive critical actions in real-time.

We are a well-funded technology company with leading investors from Silicon Valley and elsewhere, but are not your typical data or SaaS startup. The Craft team is globally distributed with a headquarters in San Francisco and offices in London, UK and Minsk, Belarus. We fully support and encourage remote workers, and have 120+ team members across North America, Canada, and Europe. We are looking for innovative and driven people who are passionate about building delightful software to join our rapidly growing team.

Craft's engineering team is solving complex data integration problems combining Craft proprietary company data with partners and customer's internal data, and producing risk-related insights that helps customers make time-sensitive decisions and save millions of dollars in potential losses. Craft UI layer organizes 400+ data points aggregated from dozens of sources into a user-friendly UI representation making it easy for supply chain professionals to digest insights and simplify their outdated collaboration workflows.

A Note to Candidates

We are an equal opportunity employer who values and encourages diversity, equity and belonging at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

About the Role

We are looking for a motivated thought leader who loves diving into complex data sets to translate them into meaningful insights, products and solutions that drive clear outcomes and create value. The ideal candidate is passionate about building a team focused on data frameworks, tools, and models to enable continued data platform scalability and growth of our supply chain insights layer. Through exploration, and a culture of educating each other on data literacy we are looking to create a system of data-informed decision making & language throughout Craft.

You will be responsible for refining Craft’s AI/ML strategy and execution of that strategy and have the opportunity to make a substantial impact on product, processes, and the company overall. The mission of this role is to expand the use of AI/ML as we continue on our journey of being an AI-driven, digital-first company; role focus will include data quality optimization and metrics standardization to substantially elevate and scale our insights layer, including alerts and risk management.

The ideal candidate will have a demonstrated track record of building high-performing teams and delivering scalable data infrastructure and AI/ML driven solutions, with a combined data science and data engineering background.  The Head of Data must have a passion for developing a team culture that inspires excellence in driving business results through collaboration. We encourage our teams to take end-to-end responsibility from conceptualization of ideas to implementation and then to measure value created and business impact to drive the highest levels of personal accountability.

In This Role You Will

• Own and drive Craft’s AI/ML strategy; develop a 3-5 year plan on data strategy including aggregated insights, innovative approaches to deliver supply chain intel to our main customer base
• Evaluate our data sources, coverage and retention policies to enable us to be more proactive and cost-efficient in our data partnerships
• Provide digital and technology transformation thought leadership in developing new services, operating model and use of technology to enable strategic capabilities
• Grow, mentor and lead the AI, data science and engineering teams. Ensuring that all team members are clear about expected standards of performance, motivated and developed to provide effective and efficient services.
• Collaboratively define specific, measurable, product metrics that relate to automation and ML solution
• Further develop our data platform and integrate the latest data models and pipelines, establishing a model management approach that is best in class for responsible data use
• Provide expertise in statistics and probability, and the evaluation of data use, algorithms and models. Develop an approach to data science standards to regulate data sources and the impact of AI on our customers.
• Manage the process of designing and running transformation initiatives throughout its entire life-cycle. Able to operationalize transformation stages of new product or service development. Able to overcome operational constraints to deliver a successful product or service. Works closely with delivery and product teams.
• Follow deployment best practices including integrating ML models with CI/CD. Create and maintain automated evaluation and monitoring that can be easily communicated to business stakeholders.
• Be conversant with relevant legislation and political, social and legal as well as technological developments that impact information rights (privacy by design)
• Partner with business leaders and product managers in problem framing and conceptualization of ideas, develop consensus, and execute on a prioritized AI/ML roadmap for various use cases
• Oversee all phases of AI/ML development, from design, data gathering, training, validation and implementation; expand the use of dynamically updated AI/ML models
• Manage a suite of data science tools/platforms, pipelines and reusable code that maximizes productivity and knowledge sharing across the data science team
• Partner with data engineers to build a continuous data capture service leveraging AWS and expand feature store to include new families of data and real-time streaming data
• Collaborate with data and machine learning engineers to design and develop scalable machine learning systems (e.g., building a model execution service leveraging MLflow and SageMaker) to improve speed to market and operate with scale in production
• Partner with a cross-functional team of data engineers, machine learning engineers and product managers to launch AI/ML solutions into production
• Create automated AI and model performance monitoring that aligns with model risk management policy

What We’re Looking For

• 10+ years of experience in following areas: experimentation, product analytics, analytics platforms, risk modeling and/or user research
• 5+ years of experience building and managing high performing data science teams including recruitment, career development, mentoring and talent management. Ability to attract and retain data science and data engineering talent
• 5+ years of experience leveraging cloud-based machine learning, data infrastructure and automation to deliver AI/ML driven solutions to solve business problems
• 5+ years of experience in leveraging modern machine learning toolset and programming languages such as Python, R or Scala
• 5+ years of experience leveraging various machine learning algorithms (e.g., Gradient Boosting, Random Forest, Bayesian Optimization, neural networks, etc.)
• Exceptional background in at least one of the following areas: advanced experiment design, causal inference, or mixed-methods user research
• Exceptional ability to translate between business and technical audiences, especially in summarizing highly technical analyses to non-technical audiences
• Strong people management abilities and instincts, especially collaborating with a broad range of cross-functional stakeholders
• Demonstrated strategic and tactical abilities across long-range (12-month-plus) strategic planning, medium-term OKRs, and driving short-term execution
• Master’s or Ph.D. in Math or Technology (computer science, computer engineering, economics, applied math, statistics, engineering, or other quantitative fields)
• Proven reputation as a highly credible and collaborative partner to business leaders, engineering, and product management teams
• A relentless problem solver and out of the box thinker with a proven track record of driving business results
• Comfortable in a high-growth, dynamic, fast-paced and agile environment
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills and the ability to work well with executives and to collaborate cross-functionally and lead through influence across functional and organizational lines

Benefits 

• Competitive salary + equity at a well-funded VC-backed startup
• Unlimited vacation time
• Flexible work hours
• Excellent covered health, dental, and vision insurance + 401K
• Monthly stipend (food, gym/wellness membership or classes, cell phone, internet)
• High-end Apple laptop of your choice
• Workstation allowance (standing desk, chair, monitor, etc.)
• Collaborative, high-paced, supportive culture
• Conference attendance
• Unlimited budget for books