Founding Data Lead

San Francisco

### About the role The owner of **Pocket's data foundation and decision-making systems end to end** . You make our data reliable, accessible, and actionable across **product, growth, marketing, sales, finance, and operations**. Pocket has already reached **hundreds of thousands of customers** and is scaling toward millions. Our data spans customer acquisition, e-commerce, hardware, app usage, subscriptions, customer support, and international markets. Your job is to connect these sources into a **trusted system that helps us understand our customers and consistently make better decisions**. You will build the core data infrastructure, define how Pocket measures the customer journey, and work directly with teams to turn analysis into clear recommendations. You should be equally comfortable **writing SQL, designing data models, investigating customer behavior, and explaining to founders what the company should do next**. This is a **hands-on, founder-facing role** for someone who wants to build Pocket's data function from the ground up---not simply maintain dashboards or respond to reporting requests. ### What you'll own * **Pocket's data strategy, architecture, and analytics foundation** * A reliable **single source of truth** across Shopify, Amazon, advertising platforms, the Pocket app, device usage, subscriptions, customer support, and finance * **Data pipelines, warehouse architecture, transformation models, documentation, monitoring, and data quality** * Product instrumentation, event taxonomy, identity resolution, and customer lifecycle tracking * Definitions and governance for **company-wide metrics and KPIs** * Analysis of the complete customer journey: **acquisition, purchase, activation, engagement, subscription conversion, retention, churn, and referral** * Customer cohort analysis, behavioral segmentation, and identification of Pocket's highest-value users * **CAC, LTV, payback period, contribution margin, attribution, incrementality, and marketing efficiency analysis** * Product adoption, feature usage, retention, and experimentation measurement * Executive dashboards and recurring reporting for founders and functional leaders * **Proactive analysis and recommendations**---not just reporting what happened, but explaining why it happened and what Pocket should do next * Self-serve analytics that enables teams to answer common questions without compromising data quality * The long-term development of Pocket's data function, including selecting tools and helping build the future data team ### What we're looking for * **3+ years of experience** across data analytics, analytics engineering, data science, data engineering, or a similarly quantitative role * Experience working in a **high-growth startup or technology company** * Experience analyzing customer cohorts at the scale of **hundreds of thousands of users**, ideally while the company was growing toward millions * **Advanced SQL skills and strong working knowledge of Python** * Hands-on experience with modern data warehouses, transformation tools such as dbt, BI platforms, and product analytics tools * Experience **building reliable data pipelines and models**---not only analyzing existing datasets * Strong understanding of **cohort analysis, retention, funnels, segmentation, experimentation, CAC, LTV, and attribution** * Experience supporting product, growth, marketing, sales, finance, and executive decision-making * An **obsession with data accuracy, consistency, documentation, and reliability** * The ability to turn ambiguous business questions into structured analyses and clear recommendations * Strong product and commercial judgment---you understand that **the purpose of data is to improve decisions and outcomes** * Clear communication skills and the ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders * **High ownership, low ego, intellectual honesty**, and the ability to execute without constant direction * Consumer technology, DTC, e-commerce, subscription, mobile app, or hardware experience is a strong plus * Experience building a data function or operating as an early data hire is a strong plus ### What we offer * The opportunity to **build Pocket's data function from the ground up** * Ownership of data across a rapidly scaling consumer hardware and software company * **Direct access to founders** and significant influence on company and product strategy * High autonomy and the ability to turn your insights directly into action * Complex customer, product, subscription, marketing, and commercial datasets at meaningful scale * The opportunity to build the systems Pocket will use as it grows from **hundreds of thousands to millions of customers** * **Base salary of $150,000--$180,000**, depending on experience * **Meaningful equity** through Pocket's employee stock option plan About the interview - ------------------ 1. **Quick intro call (15 min)** --- experience, motivation, compensation expectations, and location fit 2. **Data case study** based on a realistic Pocket business problem 3. **Technical interview** covering data architecture, SQL, analytics, and data reliability 4. **Cross-functional interview** with Product, Growth, or Engineering 5. **Interview with the founders** 6. Reference check 7. Offer 8. Onboarding About Pocket - ----------- Pocket is a **Y Combinator W26 company** building a premium hardware plus software product in the AI voice recorder space. We are obsessed with **quality and speed** . We are scaling very fast in the US and European markets and building a device experience that can become the **category leader**.