PlanetScale is looking for a leader to build and lead its Data Science function to support best-in-class analytics, forecasting, and decision-making, enabling the company to shape decision-making through data and inform how they are executing against company goals and where to direct resources.
Requirements
- Fluency in SQL and analytical modeling: Expert at pulling, joining, and transforming data from complex schemas; able to define and maintain core business metrics (ARR, retention, funnel conversion) with precision.
- Hands-on experience building dashboards and analyses: Comfortable creating KPI dashboards in modern data analysis tools and running ad-hoc SQL analyses to drive product and business decisions.
- Proficiency with dbt or modern transformation frameworks: Capable of designing modular, testable models and documenting data logic for reusability.
- Analytical and statistical breadth: Skilled in experimentation (A/B testing, lift measurement), cohort and retention analysis, forecasting (Prophet, ARIMA), predictive modeling (e.g., lead scoring, churn prediction), and casual models.
- Python: Confident using Python notebooks for analysis, data cleaning, and lightweight modeling; familiarity with pandas, scikit-learn, or equivalent libraries.
- Working knowledge of data pipelines and orchestration: Can contribute to or extend ETL/ELT jobs in Airflow or Dagster; understands ingestion from SaaS and event sources.
- Awareness of warehouse performance and governance (nice to have) — Familiar with optimizing BigQuery or Snowflake queries, managing spend, and monitoring data quality and lineage
Responsibilities
- Build and be responsible for PlanetScale’s data and analytics efforts from zero to one
- Partner with Marketing, Sales, and Customer Engineering to deliver pipeline, conversion, and ROI analytics; build forecasting for new business and retention, attribution, CAC/payback reporting.
- Drive analysis of feature adoption, engagement, and retention indicators.
- Take ownership for implementing experimentation and testing to understand the success or failures of growth and product efforts.
- Own our data warehouse and metric layer using your tools of choice.
- Contribute to or extend ETL/ELT jobs in Airflow or Dagster; understands ingestion from SaaS and event sources.
Other
- Bias for action and autonomy: Operates comfortably in a startup environment, prioritizing impact over perfection.
- Ability to collaborate across all functions: Excellent communication with everyone from execs to engineers; covering everything from schema design to collaborating on KPIs, experiments, and insights.
- We strive to build an inclusive environment where all people feel that they are equally respected and valued, whether they are a candidate or an employee.
- We welcome applicants of any educational background, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, age, citizenship, socioeconomic status, disability, pregnancy status, and veteran status.
- If you have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you; we're happy to accommodate!
